The Girl in Times Square
Paullina Simons
A stunning and powerful contemporary love story from one of the best storytellers this century. What if everything you believed about your life was a lie?Meet Lily Quinn. She is broke, struggling to finish college, pay her rent, find love. Adrift in bustling New York City, the most interesting things in Lily’s life happen to the people around her. But Lily loves her aimless life … until her best friend and roommate Amy disappears. That’s when Spencer Patrick O’Malley, a cynical, past his prime NYPD detective with demons of his own, enters Lily’s world. And a sudden financial windfall which should bring Lily joy instead becomes an ominous portent of the dark forces gathering around her.But fate isn’t finished with Lily.She finds herself fighting for her life as Spencer’s search for the missing Amy intensifies, leading Lily to question everything she knew about her friend and family. Startling revelations about the people she loves force her to confront truths that will leave her changed forever.From a master storyteller comes a heart-wrenching, magnificent and unputdownable novel.This is the odyssey of two young women, Lily and Amy, roommates and friends on the verge of the rest of their lives.
PAULLINA SIMONS
THE GIRL IN TIMES SQUARE
Copyright (#ulink_2f588342-4380-5e63-b05d-d035ac86c1ab)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
Copyright © Paullina Simons 2004
“Lost in the Flood” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1972
Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Fire” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1978
Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved.
“Across the Border” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1995
Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved.
Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007118939
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007383979
Version: 2018-05-24
Dedication (#ulink_80c021b9-57d8-59b3-92a4-44cdbd453e62)
For my sister, Elizabeth, as ever searching And for Melanie Cain, who has been to the crying room
Epigraph (#ulink_d2edec10-645d-510f-9ed1-521cca2aaf13)
In the Vatican after they have chosen a new pope, they lead him to a room off the Sistine Chapel where he is given the clothing of a pope. It is called the Crying Room. It is called that because it is there that the burdens and responsibilities of the papacy tend to come crashing down on the new pontiff. Many of them have wept. The best have wept.
PEGGY NOONAN
Contents
Cover (#u2fbb36c5-caff-5747-aa9e-068c91dd28eb)
Title Page (#u72a465a6-143c-58d2-994e-24727400ba11)
Copyright (#ulink_86d703fa-31d5-5693-b4a2-b982c87bff87)
Dedication (#ulink_75dd8694-2278-5195-8dec-d2507d84d1e4)
Epigraph (#ulink_fab94f46-f0fe-5d74-97fb-e721e2cf0863)
The Past as Prologue (#ulink_08485193-da2f-53dc-b58a-6786b5491450)
Just Before the Beginning
Lily Quinn (#ulink_bab109e6-7193-53c2-8f98-1951527c1303)
Allison Quinn (#ulink_96f4dc6e-0309-56c9-b1f4-b924bdc1339f)
A Man and a Woman (#ulink_d3ad7ac7-04bc-5604-a0bd-49a723eea1df)
Part I. In the Beginning (#ulink_c542fb0e-ebf1-5c67-8bee-fea06f785878)
1. Appearing To Be One Thing When it is in Fact Another (#ulink_9e0cd9bf-3c21-51b9-ae10-733b6aebdbd7)
2. Hawaii (#ulink_8f2089ef-092d-5cd6-88ff-a7698cb7c593)
3. An Hour at the 9th Precinct (#ulink_47717268-dc64-58c5-bf8d-be2fb8d6d594)
4. Wallets on Dressers (#ulink_5e20b23c-b00c-5d75-b7e9-50d430658cd1)
5. Spencer Patrick O’Malley (#ulink_e2f30285-a5fc-5052-b9ca-0a7b507497af)
6. Conversations with Mothers (#ulink_4c328652-6208-52f7-9933-9162be1d8ad4)
7. Birds of Paradise (#ulink_8362f3c4-ce64-5e81-944f-f88afbf31d2c)
8. The Disadvantages of Walking to Work (#ulink_a79d0171-8936-52cd-991d-67f98b09f661)
9. Ignorance in Amy’s Bed (#ulink_1a3502a6-76f1-5b6e-bb2c-57a5f9534e98)
10. Things in the Closet (#ulink_5b3894d7-d1f6-58d5-b4f8-1536fa223631)
11. Spencer Patrick O’Malley and Lilianne Quinn (#ulink_2bab3590-c68f-55c9-8386-2e38f44c4477)
12. A Little Rented Honda (#ulink_9cc69625-300b-5043-848e-be0749ebd270)
13. Lily and the City of Dreams (#ulink_d45d5338-dd07-57cd-a4ad-f2977b9a1f15)
14. Riding Shotgun (#ulink_f44a09a2-73a6-55f3-9976-c051ffbefd27)
15. Spencer’s Twelve Tickets (#ulink_dc33833e-d71e-5bd9-9c79-882474395b50)
16. Reality: The Actual Thing that it Appears to Be (#ulink_361bfa28-c335-524c-bce9-1f5c941974b2)
Part II. The Middle of the Road (#litres_trial_promo)
17. The Biggest River in Egypt (#litres_trial_promo)
18. Fertility Options (#litres_trial_promo)
19. Fibers of Suspicion (#litres_trial_promo)
20. Just Another Saturday Night for Lily (#litres_trial_promo)
21. Just Another Saturday Night for Spencer (#litres_trial_promo)
22. In the Garden of the Barber Cop (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Chemotherapy 101 (#litres_trial_promo)
24. Meet the Parents (#litres_trial_promo)
25. Chemo 202 (#litres_trial_promo)
26. The Church on 51st Street (#litres_trial_promo)
27. Liz Monroe and 57/57 (#litres_trial_promo)
28. The Soup Kitchen (#litres_trial_promo)
29. Spencer Stuck Twice (#litres_trial_promo)
30. Advanced Chemotherapy (#litres_trial_promo)
31. Advanced Interrogation (#litres_trial_promo)
32. Andrew’s Alibi (#litres_trial_promo)
33. The Laugh Track (#litres_trial_promo)
34. Lily’s Stations (#litres_trial_promo)
35. Lily’s Mother is Here (#litres_trial_promo)
36. Lily’s Stations, Continued (#litres_trial_promo)
37. Beautiful People (#litres_trial_promo)
38. Cancer Shmancer (#litres_trial_promo)
39. Larry DiAngelo as Imhotep (#litres_trial_promo)
Part III. The End Game (#litres_trial_promo)
40. Lily as an Ancient Egyptian (#litres_trial_promo)
41. Shopping as Healing (#litres_trial_promo)
42. The Financial and Eating Woes of a Lottery Winner and a Cancer Survivor (#litres_trial_promo)
43. A Little Thing about Spencer (#litres_trial_promo)
44. The Muse (#litres_trial_promo)
45. A Masters Course in Chemo (#litres_trial_promo)
46. The Mighty Quinn (#litres_trial_promo)
47. Harkman (#litres_trial_promo)
48. The Yellow Ribbons (#litres_trial_promo)
49. Baseball as a Metaphor for Everything (#litres_trial_promo)
50. April Fools (#litres_trial_promo)
51. At Internal Affairs Once More (#litres_trial_promo)
52. Failing Test Number One (#litres_trial_promo)
53. A Cop First (#litres_trial_promo)
54. Infernal Affairs (#litres_trial_promo)
55. Failing Test Number Two (#litres_trial_promo)
56. Unraveling at Home and Overseas (#litres_trial_promo)
57. An Encounter at Tompkins Square (#litres_trial_promo)
58. Eight Days in Maui (#litres_trial_promo)
59. And Now—About Spencer (#litres_trial_promo)
60. John Doe (#litres_trial_promo)
61. Olenka Pevny (#litres_trial_promo)
62. Lindsey (#litres_trial_promo)
63. A Terminal Degree in Cancer Treatment (#litres_trial_promo)
64. Amy and Andrew (#litres_trial_promo)
65. Nathan Sinclair (#litres_trial_promo)
66. A Boat in Key Biscayne (#litres_trial_promo)
67. Cabo San Lucas (#litres_trial_promo)
68. A Day at the Abbey (#litres_trial_promo)
69. An Anarchist in Action (#litres_trial_promo)
70. Massacre Grounds (#litres_trial_promo)
71. The Cancer Chick and the Revolutionary (#litres_trial_promo)
72. The Peyote Dance (#litres_trial_promo)
73. The Lessons of the Russian Tsar (#litres_trial_promo)
74. Acting Without Measure (#litres_trial_promo)
75. The Postman (#litres_trial_promo)
76. The Only One (#litres_trial_promo)
77. Wollman’s Rink (#litres_trial_promo)
78. DNR (#litres_trial_promo)
79. And Now—About Amy (#litres_trial_promo)
80. The Other Side (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE (#ulink_84759fcc-df09-577c-ab7f-46752b982740)
“Spencer, do you see this?”
“Katie, I do.”
“Her investments are shooting out of the sky. I’ve never seen anything like it. Her fund is growing at rate of thirty-four percent a year.”
“Joy, should we have some lunch?”
“Stop smiling at me like that, Larry, I know what your lunch entails. I can’t. I’m knitting.”
Giggling.
“Did you read the paper this morning? In Ethiopia, a grenade exploded at a wedding, killing the bride and three other people.”
“Mother, please!”
“What? Apparently it’s custom for guests to fire their guns at weddings in wild jubilation, though grenades are apparently more rare.”
“You’ll have to excuse my mother, Detective O’Malley.”
“Thank you, but I’m quite entertained by her, Mrs. Quinn.”
“Mrs. Quinn, how are you feeling?”
“I could be better, Dr. DiAngelo. I’m tired all the time. And I wanted to show you this.” There is a pause, the sound of shoes walking across the floor. “What do you think this is? Some kind of a weird rash, right?”
“Allie, do you think you can stop showing the doctor your ailments with the police in the room?”
“Oh, Detective O’Malley has seen worse than this, Mother. Haven’t you, detective?”
“Much worse, and please—call me Spencer.”
“No, Allie, I just don’t understand you at all. Why do this now? It’s just a rash!”
“Oh, you can talk about your Ethiopian exploding brides, but I can’t show the doctor a real problem? The doctor is here, I might as well take advantage, right, Dr. DiAngelo?”
“Absolutely Mrs. Quinn. Let’s see what you’ve got here.”
There is sighing, clothes rustling, a silence, an ahem, a “Well, what is it?”
“Well, Mrs. Quinn, it’s very serious, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, no, what is it, doctor?”
“I’m afraid—I think—I can’t be sure, but I think it’s the Baghdad boil.”
There is silence, a slight familiar snicker from a man’s throat.
“A what?”
“Yes. A tiny sand fly from the Middle East with a fierce parasite stewing in its gut that causes stubborn and ugly sores that linger for months, sometimes years.”
There is a shrieking of incredulous disgust. “Doctor, what are you talking about? What sandflies from the Middle East? We’re in the middle of New York City! It’s just a little chafing, that’s all, very normal, just a little chafing.”
“Larry!”
“Yes, Joy?”
“Stop torturing the poor woman, this is completely unacceptable. Tell her you’re an oncologist, not a dermatologist. Allison, don’t listen to a word he says, he knows nothing but cancer. He is just trying to rile you.”
“Oh.” And then, “I find that completely unacceptable.”
There is laughter everywhere.
No one even noticed when Lily opened her eyes. She was propped up in bed, in her clean hospital room with beige walls, and her paintings everywhere, and white lilies everywhere because they just don’t listen. It seemed like mid-morning. In front of her was the TV, to the right of her was the open window with white lilies in front of it, with a bit of sky beyond them, her mother and grandmother were on that side, and on the other, to her left, sat Spencer. Behind him stood Katie, looking over his shoulder at the financial statements. To his right sat Joy, still knitting, the yellow sweater sizable now. Next to her was DiAngelo, standing close. Lily didn’t move, just her eyes blinked. It was Spencer who looked up from the statements, lifted his eyes, and noticed an awake Lily.
Spencer said, “Lily, I think your broker deserves a raise. Because while you were lying about in the hospital, grafting marrow, she made you seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars.”
“Sleeping Beauty is awake!” said her mother.
“Lily, finally! I mean, we always said, oh, but did that child love to sleep, but I think you’ve outdone yourself,” said her grandmother.
Lily couldn’t speak. The breathing tube was in her mouth. She moved her hand to remove the tube, and immediately started choking. “Good God,” she croaked. “How long have I been here?”
DiAngelo put the tube back in her throat, adjusted the mask over her face, the clip over her nose, placed her hands back down on the blanket. “Since your transplant? Eighteen days. Don’t speak. Write it down on the Magna Doodle.”
She pulled the mask, the nose clip, the breathing hose out again. Breathing, gasping. “Where’s Papi?”
“Oh, you know your father,” said Allison. “He can’t sit still for a second. He’s out smoking. He told me this morning, let’s just go for an hour, Allie, and then we’ll take a walk in Central Park. He’s impossible.”
Lily and her mother looked at each other for a few moments, Maui in their eyes.
“It’s a good thing you woke up. You are about to miss your twenty-sixth birthday,” said Allison. “You can sleep through anything.”
Lily said between breaths, “Do you see the picture I made for you?” She pointed to the oil on canvas of a little blonde girl in the close lap of a brown-haired woman on a bench in a village yard.
“I see it,” said Allison. She said nothing for a second. “I don’t know who that’s supposed to be. Doesn’t look like me at all.”
“Lily,” said Joy. “Come on, get up. You can’t be lying around all day. We booked a very large room at the Plaza to celebrate your birthday.”
Lily turned her head to look at Joy inquisitively.
Marcie came in. “Oh, look at this, I’m gone for five minutes and Spunky wakes!”
“Yes, Spunky,” said Spencer, “get up. Because Keanu is playing in The Replacements and The Watcher. You’ve got double Keanu waiting for you.”
Lily took the tube out. “Hey,” she mouthed. “Can you give him and me a minute?”
They gladly filed out of the room, and Spencer came close to her, putting his head in the space between her opened arm and her neck. She held his head, caressed his grown-out hair. There were tears in his eyes he didn’t want her to see. This time it was she who said, “Shh, shh.”
“Tell me,” she said, taking quick breaths of oxygen between her words, “did I miss anything?”
“Nothing,” Spencer replied, his caressing hand on her face. “It is all as you left it.”
In October Lily was off the respirator. By Thanksgiving, she was released from the hospital. She never went back to 9th Street and Avenue C. She stayed with Spencer until they found a floor-through apartment in one of the buildings in brand-spanking-new Battery Park City, all the way downtown overlooking the Hudson River, with fourteen-foot ceilings, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, plenty of closets, and a huge living room that became an art space appropriate for a girl preparing for her first gallery show. The living room had a 39th floor view of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. The whole shebang was quite something and didn’t set her back eleven million. “That’s because it has no crown molding,” pointed out Spencer.
Once Lily asked him what he would have done if she had died, and he mumbled and joked and equivocated his way through an answer, but in the dark of night in their bed, he said, “I would have taken your money, given a quarter to your family, a quarter to the American Leukemia Foundation, and retired from the force. I would have moved to Florida, and opened a gumshoe agency on the waters of Key Biscayne. I would have been warm all the time, maybe built a Spanish contemporary home. That way I would have lived where you had wanted to live, in a house you would have liked. I would have planted palm trees for you, and gone out on the sea for you and thought of you as my last rose of the summer.”
Spencer drank less. The intervals between his bouts got longer, and once he went for four months without. He told Lily that he couldn’t expect more out of life than being with a girl who made him go four whole months without whisky in the hands. “Well, because now Lily’s in the hands,” she said. “Your hands are full.”
Lily continued to go to Paul at Christopher Stanley for her color, despite Spencer’s maintaining that anyone who changed his own hair as often as Paul—from bleached blond to brown and back again constantly—should not be trusted.
Spencer still cuts Lily’s hair.
To continue to be partnered with Gabe, Spencer asked Whittaker to transfer him out of missing persons and into homicide. At the celebratory lunch at McLuskey’s, Gabe maintained to Lily it was all so that Spencer could finally proclaim, “This is Detective O’Malley from homicide.”
Grandma left her house and came every Thursday to meet Lily for lunch. Afterward she and Lily went to the movies, and then Lily took Grandma back to Brooklyn where Spencer came to pick her up after work.
And sometimes, while Manhattan Island twinkled across the river, Lily and Spencer still parked at their Greenpoint docks in his Buick while Bruce Springsteen rocked on the radio.
Anne left KnightRidder and found a new job as a financial writer for Cantor Fitzgerald. She had an office on the south side of the north tower of the World Trade Center, on the 105th floor, and on a clear day she thought she could see all the way to Atlantic City. The New York Harbor, Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Verazano Bridge, and the Atlantic Ocean stretched out before her. She had her desk turned around so she could sit every morning when she got in at eight, and sip her coffee and get ready for her day. She told everyone that she had started a new, happier life. Her sisters came to visit her every Monday for lunch. That’s how they repaired their sisterly bonds. Lily left her painting, Amanda left her children with a babysitter, and they met at noon, taking turns choosing a restaurant. Anne wouldn’t let anyone else pick up the tab. “It’s the least I can do,” she said to Lily. And every other Tuesday morning, Anne took Lily to Mount Sinai for her blood work. When Cantor complained about her coming in at eleven on alternate Tuesdays—despite the fact that she stayed in the office until nine those evenings—Anne said they could fire her if they wished, but it was a deal-breaker: she was going to take her sister who was in remission to the hospital.
Cantor Fitzgerald didn’t fire her.
George and Allison sold their Maui condo and came back to the continent, buying a small house in North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their house was on a little lake where George had a dock from which he fished, and a row boat that he took out every once in a while. He had a vegetable garden and planted a hundred times more than he could eat, praising America for its bounty. He gave all of his vegetables to his summer neighbors. He bought a TV and a satellite dish, and watched sports live and movies galore and went on the Internet, and cooked for Allison, and for his brother and his wife, who lived nearby. He had a busy life. He didn’t travel much, and Allison didn’t either, having learned how to buy gin right off the Internet and have the UPS man deliver it straight to her front door.
George misses his wife. But the tomatoes are very good in the summer. And there’s fishing.
Larry DiAngelo married Joy. They adopted a baby girl from South Korea, and they called her Lily. Joy retired from nursing and stayed home with her baby, in unrepentant daily bliss, cooking and watching Disney videos.
Jim left Jan McFadden. She had no choice but to get into shape and raise her twin children. Every Saturday she goes to the Port Jefferson cemetery on Route 112, and sits by the purple stone with the lilac flowers, easily the most decorated grave in the cemetery, the most colorful, the most vibrant, you can see it from the winding road half a mile away, the purples and violets shout like animated billboards against the gray of the rest. Our beloved daughter and friend, Amy Jean McFadden, 1975–1999.
When Lily talks of Amy, she still says “She has left.” Or, “She has gone missing.”
When Lily can bear to speak of Andrew, she still says, “He has left.” Or, “He has gone missing.”
A small plaque, a favorite quote, written in calligraphy by Amy: When senseless hatred rules the earth, where will redemption reside? hung on the door of Amy’s studio as a last remainder from Amy’s life on 9th Street and Avenue C, and then was stored, deep in Lily’s large closet in Battery Park City, at the back of her summer T-shirts, until Lily found it one day and gave it to Anne, who liked it so much she hung it up in her office on the 105th floor of the North Tower.
One of these New York mornings—it was too beautiful to stay inside, even for Lily who usually liked to go back to bed after Spencer left for work. But she saw the bright and clear skies and seventy-five degrees and no wind—it was a magnificent Maui morning in her New York, when everything seemed not only possible but attainable—and she decided to walk with him two miles to the precinct and then maybe head on to Madison Square Park and sketch the Flatiron while the light was this good, and would soon be gone. She waited for him, basking on the warm side of the street while he went inside the deli to get them coffees. They really must get a coffee maker that worked.
Lily’s blood tests had been so good lately that DiAngelo finally approved a vacation, and Spencer—who’d never been anywhere—finally and with a little convincing, approved one, too. Not to Maui, not to Cabo San Lucas, not to Arizona, but to Key Biscayne. Two weeks, alone with Spencer! They were leaving in a few days and would stay through her 27th birthday.
A convertible buzzed by on quiet Albany Street heading to West Side Highway. The entire downtown Manhattan was in Lily’s view from north to south. A man was putting up flyers for the mayoral primary elections, on this second Tuesday in September, 2001, tacking the posters up on the pole right next to her. Her heart caught on the memory of the poles, the posters, the convertible, the long gone, the long missing.
Lily lowered her head for a moment, then raised it up to the sky and breathed in the air. It was too glorious a day.
Spencer came out of the deli and smiled at her, motioning for her to cross the street, as in, come on, I don’t have all day. She smiled back and waved, lingering just a little longer with the sun upon her face, her sketchbooks in her hands.
Lily knew that Spencer, always glad for small mercies, was glad for this: that she had been comatose and near death when Amy’s bones were discovered off the Bridle Path, because this let Lily remember Amy only as she once had been—wholly imagined and loved—and not as she really was, a person Lily never knew.
And in her new life Lily Quinn, now living each last day with first joy, could continue to hope with a great enchanting hope that maybe her brother Andrew and her friend Amy looked for each other in a place where there were no other lovers, that maybe she had waited for him until he became lost himself and abandoned his convertible after church on Sunday in the waters of the Hudson and she was waving to him from the other side, across the river. The girl slowed down, the man hopped in, and they sped away in a little rented Honda. Amy and Andrew, Allison and George, Claudia and Tomas, and Lily and her Spencer could maybe speed away, forever looking for a place where they would never be found. Without demands, without dead ends, without alcohol, without protocol, a safe place with no sorrow, no monocytes, no blastocytes, no whisky, no war, just a little bit of mercy, a wet and sunny life, and the remains of their fathomless frail free human hearts.
JUST BEFORE THE BEGINNING (#ulink_a93d3564-bdfe-5e16-a06b-3fa0c3d17c8e)
Lily Quinn (#ulink_9d4386cc-c1c3-5a9a-9fb0-e9c2f44f808e)
What happened to love? Lily whispered to herself. Has someone else taken all that was given out for the universe, or have I just not been trying hard enough? What happened to overwhelming, crushing love, the kind of love that moves earth and heaven, the kind of love my Grandma felt for her Tomas half a century ago in another world in another life, the kind of love my father says he felt for my mother when they first met swimming in that warm Caribbean Sea? Doesn’t anyone have that kind of love anymore? Isn’t anyone without armor, without walls, without pain? Isn’t anyone willing to die for love?
Obviously not tonight.
They called her Lil. Sometimes, when they loved her, they called her Liliput. She liked that. And sometimes when they didn’t love her they called her Lilianne. Tonight nobody called her nothin’. Lily, hungry and broke, stood silently with her back against the wall watching Joshua pack his things while she remained just a stoic stain on the wall, eyes the color of bark, hair like ash, dressed in black—somewhat appropriately, she thought, despite what he had said: “It’s only temporary, just to give us a short break. We need it.”
He was leaving, he was not coming back, and she was wearing black. Lily would have liked to clear her throat, say a few things, maybe convince him not to go, but again, she felt that the time for that had passed. When, she didn’t know, but it had passed all the same, and now nothing was left for her to do but watch him leave, and maybe chew on some stale pretzels.
Joshua was skinny and red-haired. Turning his muddy eyes to her, he asked, running his hand through his hair—oh how he loved his hair!—if she had anything better to do than to stand there and watch him. Lily replied that she didn’t, not really, no. She went and chewed on some stale pretzels.
She wanted to ask him why he was leaving, but unspoken between them remained his reasons. Unspoken between them much remained. His leaving would have been inconceivable a year ago: how could she handle it, how could she handle that well?
She stepped away from the wall, moved toward him, opened her mouth and he waved her off, his eyes glued to the television set. “It’s the Stanley Cup final,” was all Joshua said, one hand on his CDs, the other on the remote control with which he turned up the sound on the set, turning down the sound on Lily.
And to think that last week for her final paper, her creative-writing professor, as if the previous week’s obituary flagellation were not enough, gave them a topic of, “What would you do today if you knew that today were the last day of your life?”
Lily hated that class. She had taken it merely to satisfy an English requirement, but if she knew then what she knew now, she would have taken “Advanced Readings on John Donne” at eight in the morning on Mondays before creative writing on Wednesday at noon. Oh, the merciless parade of self-examination! First memory, first heartbreak, most memorable experience, favorite summer vacation, your own obituary (!), and now this.
All Lily fervently hoped at this moment was that today—breaking up with her college boyfriend—would not be the last day of her life.
Her apartment was too small for Sturm und Drang. The hallway served as the living room. In the kitchen the microwave was on top of the only flat counter surface and the drainer was on top of the microwave, dripping the rinsed-out Coke cans into the sink, half of which also served as storage for moldy bread—they did not eat on regular plates; they barely ate at home. There were two bedrooms—hers and Amy’s. Tonight Lily went into Amy’s room and lay down on Amy’s bed, consciously trying not to roll up into a ball.
During the commercial, Joshua got up off the couch for a drink, glanced in on her and said, “You think you could sleep with Amy? I’m going to have to take my bed back. I’d leave it, but then I’ll have nowhere to sleep.”
Lily wanted to reply. She thought she might have something witty to say. But the wittiest thing she could think of was, “What, doesn’t Shona have a bed?”
“Don’t start that again.” He walked into the kitchen.
Lily rolled up into a ball.
Joshua paid a third of the rent. And still she was broke, her diet alternating between old pretzels and Oodles of Noodles. A bagel with cream cheese was a luxury she could afford only on Sundays. Some Sundays she had to decide, newspaper or bagel.
Lily used to read her news online, but now she couldn’t afford the twenty bucks for the Internet connection. So there was no Internet, no bagel, and soon no Joshua, who was leaving and taking his bed and a third of the rent with him.
If only she had had the grades to get into New York University downtown instead of City College up on 138
Street. Lily could walk to school like she walked to work and save herself four dollars a day. That was twenty dollars a week, $80 a month. $1040 a year!
How many bagels, how much newspaper, how much coffee that thousand bucks could buy.
Lily was paying nearly $500 a month for her share of the rent. Well, actually, Lily’s mother was sending her $500 for her share of the rent, railing at Lily every single month. And coming this May, on the day of her purported, supposed, alleged graduation, Lily was going to get her last check from the bank of mom. Without Joshua, Lily’s share would rise to $750. How in the world was she going to come up with an extra $750 come June? She was already waitressing twenty-five hours a week to pay for her food, her books, her art supplies, her movies. She would have to ask for another shift, possibly two. Perhaps she could work doubles, get up early. She didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to be like Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow—in another book, some fifty years down the line.
The phone rang.
“Has he left, mama?” It was Rachel Ortiz—Amy’s other good friend, maybe even best friend, she of the sudden ironed blonde hair and the perpetual blunt manner. Someone needed to explain to Rachel that just because she was Amy’s friend, that did not automatically make her into Lily’s friend.
“No.” Lily wanted to add that watching the Stanley Cup was slowing Joshua down.
“That bastard,” Rachel said anyway.
“But soon,” said Lily. “Soon, Rach.”
“Is Amy there?”
“No.”
“Where is she? On one of her little outings?”
“Just working, I think.”
“Well, tomorrow night I don’t want you to stay in by yourself. We’re going out. My new boyfriend wants to take us to Brooklyn, to a nightclub in Coney Island.”
“To Coney Island—on Monday?” And then Lily said, “I’m not up to it. It’s a school night.”
“School, schmool. You’re not staying in by yourself. You’re going out with me and Tony.” Rachel lowered her voice to say TOnee, in a thick Italian accent. “Amy might come, too, and she’s got a friend for you from Bed-Stuy, who she says is a paTOOtie.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Lily lowered her voice to a whisper. “Joshua’s still here.”
“That bastard,” said Rachel and hung up.
“What, is Rachel trying to fix you up already?” Joshua said. “She hates me.”
Lily said nothing.
That night, after the Stanley Cup was over, up and down the five flights of stairs Joshua traipsed, taking his boxes, his crates, his bags to Avenue C and 4th Street, where he was now staying with their mutual friend Dennis, the hairstylist. (Amy had said to her, “Lil, did you ever ask yourself why Joshua would so hastily move in with Dennis? Did you ever think maybe he’s also gay?” and Lily replied, “Yes, well, don’t tell me, tell that to Shona, the naked girl from upstate New York he was calling on my phone bill.”)
Who was going to cut Lily’s hair now? Dennis had always cut it in the past. Why did Joshua get to inherit the haircutter? Well, maybe Paul, who was Amy’s other best friend, and a colorist, knew how to cut hair. She’d have to ask him.
Joshua had the decency not to ask her to help him, and Lily had the dignity not to offer.
Around 3:00 a.m., he, with his last box in hand, nodded to her, and then left, rushing past her The Girl in Times Square, her only ever oil on canvas that she had done when she was twenty and before she met Joshua.
“There are things about you I could never love,” Joshua had said to Lily two days ago when all this started to go down on the street.
“If I knew that today were the last day of my life, I’d want to be like the girl in the famous postcard, being thrown back in the middle of Times Square, kissed with passion by a stranger when the war was over.
Except—that isn’t me. That is somebody else’s fantasy of a girl in Times Square. Perhaps it’s Amy. But it’s a fraudulent Lily.
The real Lily would sleep late, until noon at least, with no classes and no work. And then, since the weather would be warm and sunny on her last day, she would go to the lake in Central Park. She would buy a tuna sandwich and a Snapple iced tea, and a bag of potato chips, and bring a book she was re-reading at the moment—Sula by Toni Morrison—slowly because she had time, and her notebook and pencils. She would spend the afternoon sitting, eating her food, drawing the boats, and Sula’s Ajax—with whom she was perversely in love—reading, thinking about what to render next. She’d have a long sit-and-sketch on the rocks and on the way home at night she would go to Times Square pushing past all the people and stand against the wall, looking at the color billboards animating and the towers sparkling, red green traffic lights changing and blue white sirens flashing, the yellow cabs whizzing by. The naked cowboy standing in the street, playing his guitar in his hat and underwear, and the families, the children, the couples, the young and the old, lovers all, taking pictures, laughing, crossing against the lights.
This girl in Times Square stands by the wall while others cross against the light.”
Lily turned away from the door and stared out the open window into the night, on Amy’s bed, alone.
Allison Quinn (#ulink_01f0e857-c912-5c46-acea-5b3c7b3f595e)
There once was a woman who lived for love. Now she stood and stared out her window. Outside she saw green palms and red rhododendrons and a blue sky and an aqua ocean and gray cliffs and black volcanoes and white sands. She did not look inside her room. She was waiting for her husband to come back from buying mangoes. It was taking him forever. She moved the curtain slightly out of the way to catch a movement outside, and sighed, remembering once upon a time when she was young, and had dreamed for the sky and the sea and plenty.
And now she had it.
And once a man put on a record on an old Victrola and took her dancing through their small bedroom. The man was handsome, and she was beautiful, and they spoke a different language then. “The look of love is in your eyes … ” Now the man went for walks by himself under the palms and over the sands. He wet his feet in the ocean and his soul in the ocean too, and then he walked to the fruit stand and bought the juicy mangoes, and the perky salesgirl said they were the best yet, and he glanced at her and smiled as he took them from her hand.
The woman stepped away from the window. He was always walking, always leaving the house. But she knew—he wasn’t leaving the house, he was leaving her. He just couldn’t stand the thought of being with her for an hour alone, couldn’t stand the thought of doing something she wanted instead of everything he wanted. When she didn’t do what he wanted, how he sulked—like a baby. That’s all he was, a baby. Do it my way or I won’t talk to you, that was him. Well, could she help it if mornings were not the best time for her? Could she help it that in the mornings she could not get up and go for a walk and a swim in all that sunshine. It depressed her beyond all sane measure that at eight in the morning the ocean was so warm, the sun was so strong. If only it would rain, just once! She was done with that damn ocean. And that sun. Those mangoes, that tuna sashimi, that volcanic ash. Done with it.
She bought heavy room-darkening curtains and drew them tight to keep out the day, to make believe it was still night.
She made believe about a lot these days.
She couldn’t understand, where was he? When was he going to grace her with his presence? Didn’t he know she was sick, she was hungry? Didn’t he know she had to eat small meals? That’s just it, he didn’t care what she needed, all he cared about was what he needed. Well, she wasn’t going to put a single bite in her mouth. If she fainted from low blood sugar and broke a bone, so much the better. She’d see how he felt then, that he was out all morning and didn’t make his sick wife breakfast. She’d see how he’d explain that one to her mother, to their kids. She’d be damned if she put a spoon of sugar into her mouth.
The bedroom door opened slightly. “I’m back. Have you eaten?”
“Of course I haven’t eaten!” she spat. “Like you even care. I could croak here like a rat, while you’re glibly walking in your fucking Maui without a single thought for me!”
… a look that time can’t erase …
Silently the door closed, and she remained in her darkened room with the drawn shades in the ginger Maui morning, alone.
A Man and a Woman (#ulink_97ff50e4-d5d4-5456-9a04-ff3d5fd1c4b5)
It’s late Friday night and they’re in her apartment. They had been to dinner, she invited him for a drink and dancing in a wine bar near where she lives. He said no. He always says no—drinking and dancing in wine bars is not his strong suit—but you have to give it to her—she’s plucky. She keeps on asking. Now they’re in her bed, and whether this is his strong suit, or whether she has no more attractive options, he doesn’t know but she’s been showing up every Friday night, so he must be doing something right, though he’d be damned if he knows what it is. The things he gives her, she can get anywhere.
And after he gives them to her, and takes some for himself, she falls contentedly asleep in the crook of his arm, while he lies opened-eyed and in the yellow-blue light coming from the street counts the tin tiles of her tall ceiling. He may look content also—in tonight’s ostensible enjoyment of his food and his woman—to someone who has observed him scientifically and empirically, wholly from without. But now in a perversion of nature, the woman is asleep and the man is staring at the ceiling. So what is in him wholly from within?
He is counting the tin tiles. He has counted them before, and what fascinates him is how every time he counts them this late at night, he comes up with a different number.
After he is sure she is asleep, he disentangles himself, gets up off the bed, and takes his clothes into the living room.
She comes out when his shoes are on. He must have jangled his keys. Usually she does not hear him leave. It’s dark in the room. They stare at each other. He stands. She stands. “I don’t understand why you do this,” she says.
“I just have to go.”
“Are you going home to your wife?”
“Stop.”
“What then?”
He doesn’t reply. “You know I go. I always go. Why give me a hard time?”
“Didn’t we have a nice evening?”
“We always do.”
“So why don’t you stay? It’s Friday. I’ll make you waffles for breakfast.”
“I don’t do waffles for Saturday breakfast.”
Quietly he shuts the door behind him. Loudly she double bolts and chains it, padlocking it if she could.
He is outside on Amsterdam. On the street, the only cars are cabs. The sidewalks are empty, the few barflies straggle in and out. Lights change green, yellow, red. Before he hails a taxi back home, he walks twenty blocks past the open taverns at three in the morning, alone.
PART I (#ulink_693aa2bf-5379-5ae8-ad05-d15428d0b7d1)
IN THE BEGINNING (#ulink_693aa2bf-5379-5ae8-ad05-d15428d0b7d1)
You call yourself free? Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! But your eyes should announce to me brightly: free for what?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
1 (#ulink_47f34575-194a-5a70-aee7-5969e7143d0a)
Appearing To Be One Thing When it is in Fact Another (#ulink_47f34575-194a-5a70-aee7-5969e7143d0a)
1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49.
And again:
1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49.
Reality: something that has real existence and must be dealt with in real life.
Illusion: something that deceives the senses of mind by appearing to exist when it does not, or appearing to be one thing when it is in fact another.
Miracle: an event that appears to be contrary to the laws of nature.
49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
Lily stared at the six numbers in the metro section of The Sunday Daily News. She blinked. She rubbed her eyes. She scratched her head. Something was not right. Amy wasn’t home, there was no one to ask, and Lily’s eyes frequently played tricks on her. Remember last year in the delivery room when she thought her sister gave birth to a boy, and shouted ‘BOY!’ because they all so wanted a boy, and it turned out to be another girl, the fourth? How could her mind have added on a penis? What was wrong with her?
Leaving her apartment she went down the narrow corridor to knock on old Colleen’s door in 5F. Fortunately Colleen was always home. Unfortunately Colleen, here since she was a young lass during the potato famine, was legally blind, as Lily to her dismay found out, because Colleen read 29 instead of 49, and 89 instead of 39. By the time Colleen finished with the numbers, Lily was even less sure of them. “Don’t worry about it, me dearie,” said Colleen sympathetically. “Everyone thinks they be seeing the winnin’ numbers.”
Lily wanted to say, not her, not she, not I, as ever just a smudge in the reflected sky. I don’t see the winning numbers. I might see penises, but I don’t imagine portholes of the universe that never open up to me.
Lily was born a second-generation American and the youngest of four children to a homemaker mother who always wanted to be an economist, and a Washington Post journalist father who always wanted to be a novelist. He loved sports and was not particularly helpful with the children. Some might have called him insensitive and preoccupied. Not Lily.
Her grandmother was worthy of more than a paragraph in a summary of Lily’s life at this peculiar juncture, but there it was. In Lily’s story, Danzig-born Klavdia Venkewicz ran from Nazi-occupied Poland with her baby, Lily’s mother, across destroyed Germany. After years in three displaced persons camps, she managed to get herself and her child on a boat to New York. She had called the baby Olenka, but changed it to a more American-sounding Allison, just as she changed her own name from Klavdia to Claudia and Venkewicz to Vail.
Lily lived all her life in and around the city of New York. She lived in Astoria, and Woodside, and Kew Gardens, and when they really moved up in the world, Forest Hills, all in the borough of Queens. Her dream was to live in Manhattan, and now she was living it, but she had been living it broke.
When George Quinn, who had been the New York City correspondent for the Post, was suddenly transferred down to D.C. because of cost-cutting internal restructuring, Lily refused to go and stayed with her grandmother in Brooklyn, commuting to Forest Hills High School to finish out her senior year. That was some wild year she had without parental supervision. Having calmed down slightly, she went to City College of New York up on 138th Street in Harlem partly because she couldn’t afford to go anywhere else, her parents having spent all their college savings on her brother—who went to Cornell. Her mother, fortunately guilt-ridden over going broke on Andrew, paid Lily’s rent.
As far as the meager rations of youthful love, Lily, too quiet for New York City, went almost without until she found Joshua—a waiter who wanted to be an actor. His red hair was not what drew her to him. It was his past sufferings and his future dreams—both things Lily was a tiny bit short on.
Lily liked to sleep late and paint. But she liked to sleep late most of all. She drew unfinished faces and tugboats on paper and doodles on contracts, and lilies all over her walls, and murals of boats and patches of water. She hoped she was never leaving the apartment because she could never duplicate the work. She had been very serious about Joshua until she found out he wasn’t serious about her. She read intensely but sporadically, she liked her Natalie Merchant and Sarah McLachlan loud and in the heart, and she loved sweets: Mounds bars, chocolate-covered jell rings, double-chocolate Oreos, chewy Chips-Ahoy, Entenmann’s chocolate cake with chocolate icing, and pound cake.
One of her sisters, Amanda, was a model mother of four model girls, and a model suburban wife of a model suburban husband. The other sister, Anne, was a model career woman, a financial journalist for KnightRidder, frequently and imperfectly attached, yet always impeccably dressed. Her brother, Andrew, Cornell having paid off, was a U.S. Congressman.
The most interesting things in Lily’s life happened to other people, and that’s just how Lily liked it. She loved sitting around into the early morning hours with Amy, Paul, Rachel, Dennis, hearing their stories of violent, experimental love lives, hitchhiking, South Miami Beach Bacchanalian feasts. She liked other people to be young and reckless. For herself, she liked her lows not to be too low and her highs not to be too high. She soaked up Amy’s dreams, and Joshua’s dreams, and Andrew’s dreams, she went to the movies three days a week—oh the vicarious thrill of them! She meandered joyously through the streets of New York, read the paper in St. Mark’s Square, and lived on in today, sleeping, painting, dancing, dreaming on a future she could not fathom. Lily loved her desultory life, until yesterday and today.
Today, this. Six numbers.
And yesterday Joshua.
Ten good things about breaking up with Joshua:
10. TV is permanently off.
9. Don’t have to share my bagel and coffee with him.
8. Don’t have to pretend to like hockey, sushi, golf, quiche, or actors.
7. Don’t have to listen to him complaining about the short shrift he got in life.
6. Don’t have to listen about his neglectful father, his nonexistent mother.
5. Don’t have to get my belly button pierced because he liked it.
4. Don’t have to stay up till four pretending we have similar interests.
3. No more wet towels on my bed.
2. Don’t have to blame him for the empty toilet roll.
And the number one good thing about breaking up with Joshua:
1. Don’t have to feel bad about my small breasts.
Ten bad things about breaking up with Joshua:
10. There
9. Are
8. Things
7. About
6. You
5. I
4. Could
3. Never
2. Love.
Oh, and the number one bad thing about breaking up with Joshua …
1. Without him, I can’t pay my rent.
1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49.
Her hair had been down her back, but last week after he left Lily had sheared it to her neck, as girls frequently did when they broke up with their boyfriends. Snip, snip. It pleased Lily to be so self-actualized. To her it meant she wasn’t wallowing in despair.
Barely even needing to brush the choppy hair now, Lily threw on her jacket and left the apartment. She headed down to the grocery store where she had bought the ticket. After going down four of the five flights, she trudged back upstairs—to put her shoes on. When she finally got to the store on 10th and Avenue B, she opened her mouth, fumbled in her pocket, and realized she’d left the ticket by the shoe closet.
Groaning in frustration, tensing the muscles in her face, Lily grimaced at the store clerk, a humorless Middle Eastern man with a humorless black beard, and went home. She didn’t even look for the ticket. She saw the mishaps as a sign, knew the numbers couldn’t have matched, couldn’t have. Not her lottery ticket! She lay on Amy’s bed and waited for the phone to ring. She stared out the window, trying to make her mind a blank. The bedroom windows faced the inner courtyard of several apartment buildings. There were many greening trees and long narrow yards. Most people never pulled down the shades on the windows that faced inward. The trees, the grass were perceived to be shields from the world. Shields maybe from the world but not from Lily’s eyes. What kind of a pervert stared into other people’s windows anyway?
Lily stared into other people’s windows. She stared into other people’s lives.
One man sat and read the paper in the morning. For two hours he sat. Lily drew him for her art class. She drew another lady, a young woman, who, after her shower, always leaned out of her window and stared at the trees. For her improv class, she drew her favorite—the unmarried couple who in the morning walked around naked and at night had sex with the shades up and the lights on. She watched them from behind her own shades, embarrassed for them and herself. They obviously thought only the demons were watching them, judging from the naughty things they got up to. Lily knew they were unmarried because when he wasn’t home, she read “Today’s Bride” magazine and then fought with him each Saturday night after drinking.
Lily had drawn their cat many times. But today she got out her sketchbook and mindlessly penciled in the number, 49, 49, 49, 49, 49, 49, 49, 49, 49, 49, 49. It couldn’t be, right? It was just a cosmic mistake? Of course! Of course it was, the numbers may have been correct, but they were for a different date: how many times has she heard about that? She sprung up to check.
No, no. Numbers matched. Date matched, too.
She went into Amy’s room. She and Amy were going to go to the movies today, but Amy wasn’t home, and there was no sign of her; she hadn’t come home from wherever she was yesterday.
Lily waited. Amy always gave the appearance of coming right back.
Lily. Her mother forgot to put the third L into her name. Though she herself was an Allison with a double L. Oh, for God’s sake, what was she thinking about? Was Lilianne jealous of her mother’s double L? Where was her mind going with this? Away from six numbers. Away from 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
She had a shower. She dried her pleasingly boyish hair, she looked through The Daily News and settled on the 2:15 at the Angelica of The Butcher Boy.
While walking past the grocery store she thought of something, and taking a deep breath, stepped inside.
“Excuse me,” Lily said, coughing from acute discomfort. “What’s the lottery up to at the last drawing?” She felt ridiculous even asking. She was red in the pale face.
“For how many numbers?” the clerk said gruffly.
Not looking at him, Lily thought about not replying. She finally said to the Almond Joy bars, “All of them.”
“All six? Let’s see … ah, yes, eighteen million dollars. But it depends who else wins.”
“Of course.” She backed out of the store.
“Usually a few people win.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did your numbers come in?”
“No, no.”
Lily got out as fast as she could.
18 was one of the numbers. So was 1.
That was in April. After Joshua, Lily swore off men for life, concluding that there wasn’t a single decent one in the entire tri-state area, except for Paul and he was incontrovertibly (as if there were any other way) gay. Rachel kept offering her somewhat unwelcome matchmaking services, Paul and Amy kept offering their welcome support services. They went to see other movies besides The Butcher Boy, and The Phantom Menace and sat until all hours drinking tequila and discussing Joshua’s various demerits to make Lily feel better. And eventually both the tequila and the discussions did.
Lily—making her lottery ticket into wall art for the time being—affixed it with red thumbtacks to her corkboard that had thumb-tacked to it all sorts of scraps from her life: photos of her together with her brother, some of her two sisters, photos of her grandma, photos of her six nieces, photos of her father, of her cat who died five years ago from feline leukemia, of Amy, report cards from college (not very good) and even from high school (not much better). The wall used to have photos of Joshua, but she took them down, drew over his face, erasing him, leaving a black hole, and then put them back. And now her lottery ticket was scrap art, too.
And Amy, who had prided herself on reading only The New York Times, never read a rag like The Daily News, and because she hadn’t, she didn’t know what Lily’s grandmother knew and brought to Lily’s attention one Thursday when Lily was visiting.
Before she left, she knocked on Amy’s door, and when there was no answer she slightly opened it, saying “Ames?” But the bed was made, the red-heart, white hand-stitched quilt symmetrically spread out in all the corners.
Holding onto the door handle Lily looked around, and when she didn’t see anything to stop her gaze she closed the door behind her. She left Amy a note on her door. “Ames, are we still on for either The Mummy or The Matrix tomorrow? Call me at Grandma’s, let me know. Luv, Lil.”
She went to Barnes & Noble on Astor Place and bought June issues of Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, Cosmopolitan (her grandmother liked to keep abreast of what the “young people were up to”), and she also picked up copies of National Review, American Spectator, The Week, The Nation, and The Advocate. Her grandmother liked to know what everybody was up to. In her grandmother’s house the TV was always on, picture in picture, CNN on the small screen, C-Span on the big. Grandma didn’t like to listen to CNN, just liked to see their mouths move. When Congress was in session, Grandma sat in her one comfortable chair, her magazines around her, her glasses on, and watched and listened to every vote. “I want to know what your brother is up to.” When Congress was not in session, she was utterly lost and for weeks would putter around in the kitchen or clean obsessively, or drink bottomless cups of strong coffee while she read her news-magazines and occasionally watched C-Span for parliamentary news from Britain. To the question of what she had done with herself before C-Span, Grandma would reply, “I was not alive before C-Span.”
She lived in Brooklyn on Warren Street, between Clinton and Court in an ill-kept brownstone marred further not by the disrepair of the front steps but by the bars on the windows. And not just on the street-level windows. Or just the parlor windows. Or the second floor windows, or the third. But all the windows. All windows in the house, four floors, front and back, were covered in iron bars. The stone façade on the building itself was crumbling but the iron bars were in pristine shape. Her grandmother, for reasons that were never made clear, had not ventured once out of her house—in six years. Not once.
Lily rang the bell.
“Who is it?” a voice barked after a minute.
“It’s me.”
“Me who?” Strident.
“Me, your granddaughter.”
Silence.
“Lily. Lily Quinn.” She paused. “I used to live with you. I come every Thursday.”
A few minutes later there was the noise of the vestibule door unlatching, of three locks unlocking, of the chain coming off, and then came the noise of the front door’s three dead-bolt locks unbolting, of a titanium sliding lock sliding, of another chain coming off, and finally of the front door being opened, just a notch, maybe eight inches, and a voice rushing through, “Come in, come in, don’t dawdle.”
Lily squeezed in through the opening, wondering if her grandmother would open the door wider if Lily herself were wider. Would she, for example, open the door wider for Amanda who’d had four kids?
Inside was cool and dark and smelled as if the place hadn’t been aired out in weeks. “Grandma, why don’t you open the windows? It’s stuffy.”
“It’s not Memorial Day, is it?” replied her grandmother, a white-haired, small woman, portly and of serious mien, who took the bags out of Lily’s hands and carried them briskly to the kitchen at the back of the house.
Grandma’s home was tidy except for the newspapers that were piled on top of the round kitchen table, The New York Times first, then The Observer, then The Wall Street Journal, and then the tabloids, Newsday, Post and News.
“Do you want a cup of tea?”
“No, I’m going to have to get going soon.”
“Get going! You just got here.”
“Last week of finals, Grandma. Perhaps you’ve heard.” Lily smiled just in case her grandmother decided to take offense.
“I’ve heard, I’ve heard plenty. How are the subways this morning?”
“They’re fine—”
“Oh, sure, you can’t even fake a polite answer anymore. Did you stand far from the yellow line?”
“I did better than that,” said Lily, putting milk in the refrigerator. “I sat down on the bench.”
Her grandmother squirmed. “Oh, Lily, how is that better? Sitting on that filth-covered bench, how many of those people who sat on it before washed their clothes that morning? And they’re sitting next to you, breathing on you, watching over your shoulder, seeing what you’re reading, hearing your Walkman songs, such loss of privacy. All the homeless sit on that bench.”
Lily wanted to remark that, no, all the homeless were lying on the steps of the 53rd Street church on Fifth Avenue, but said nothing.
“From now on, I give you money, you take a cab to see me.”
Lily wanted to button up her jacket, if only she had one. “So what’s going on with you?”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” said her grandmother, Claudia Vail, seventy-nine years old, widow, war survivor, death-camp survivor, all cataracts removed, a new pacemaker installed, arthritis in check, no mysterious bumps, growths, or distensions, but widow first and foremost, “On Sunday a child fell out of his sixth-floor apartment in the projects and died. This is on a Sunday. What are the parents doing if not looking after their child on a Sunday? On Monday a five-year-old girl was stabbed and killed by her brother and his friend who were supposed to be looking after her. The mother when she returned home from work said, ‘It’s so unlike him. He’s usually such a nice boy.’ Then we find out that this boy, age eleven, had already spent three years in juvenile detention for beating his grandmother blind. The mother apparently overlooked that when she left her child with him.”
“Grandma,” Lily said feebly, putting up her hands in a defensive gesture.
“Last Friday, a vegan couple in Canarsie were arrested for feeding their child soybeans and tofu from the day she was born. That mother’s milk must have been all dried up because at sixteen months the child weighed ten pounds, the weight of a two-to-three-month-old.”
“Grandma,” said Lily helplessly. Her grandmother was cornering her between herself and the fridge. Lily could tell by her grandmother’s eyes she was a long way from done. “Did anything happen on Saturday?”
“On Saturday your sister and that no-good man of hers came over—”
“Which sister?”
“And I told her,” Claudia continued, “that she was lucky not to have any children.”
“Oh. That one. Grandma, if life is no good here, why don’t you move? Move to Bedford with Amanda. Nothing ever happens in Bedford. Hence the name. City of beds.”
“Who said life is not good here? Life is perfect. And are you insane? With Amanda and her four kids? So she could take care of me, too? Why would I do that to her? Why would I do that to myself?”
“Did José bring your groceries this week?” The kitchen looked a bit bare.
“Not anymore. I fired him.”
“You did?” Lily was alarmed. Not for her grandmother—for herself. If José was no longer delivering groceries, then who was going to? “Why did you fire him?”
“Because in the paper last Saturday was a story of an old woman just like me who was robbed by the delivery boy—robbed and raped, I think.”
“Was it José?” Lily said, trying not to sound weary. Struggling not to rub the bridge of her nose.
“No, it wasn’t José. But one can never be too careful, can one, Liliput?”
“No, one certainly cannot.”
“Your door, is it locked? To your bedroom?” Grandmother shook her head. “Are you still living with those bums, those two who cannot keep their sink clean? Yes, your father told me about his visit to your abode. He told me what a sty it was. I want you to find a new place, Lil. Find a new place. I’ll pay the realtor fee.”
Lily was staring at her grandmother with such confusion that for a moment she actually wondered if perhaps she’d never spoken of her living arrangements with her grandmother, or whether there had been too many residential changes for her grandmother to keep track of.
“Grandma,” she said slowly. “I haven’t lived with those bums, as you like to call them, in years. I’ve been living with Amy, in a different apartment, remember? On 9th Street and Avenue C?” She looked at her grandmother with concern.
Her grandmother was lost in thought. “Ninth Street, Ninth Street,” she muttered. “Why does that ring a bell … ?”
“Um, because I live there?”
“No, no.” Claudia stared off into the distance. Suddenly her gaze cleared. “Oh yes! Last Saturday, same day as the old woman’s battery and rape, a small piece ran in the Daily News. Apparently three weeks ago there was a winning lottery ticket issued at a deli on the corner of 10th and Avenue B, and the winner hasn’t come to claim it yet.”
Lily was entirely mute except for the whooshing sound of her blinking lashes, sounding deafening even to herself. “Oh, yeah?” she said and could think of nothing else. The sink faucet tapped out a few water droplets. The sun was bright through the windows.
“Can you imagine? The News publishes the numbers every day in hopes that the person recognizes them and comes forward. Eighteen million dollars.” She tutted. “Imagine. By the way, they publish the numbers so often I know them by heart. Some of the numbers I could have chosen myself. Forty-nine, the year I came to America, thirty-nine, the year my Tomas went to war. Forty-five, my Death March.” She clucked with delight and disappointment. “Do you go to that deli?”
“Um—not anymore.”
“Maybe it’s lost,” said Claudia. “Maybe it’s lying unclaimed in the gutter somewhere because it fell out of the winner’s pocket. Watch the sidewalks, Liliput, around your building. An unsigned lottery ticket is a bearer bond.”
“A what what?”
“A bearer bond.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” said Claudia, “that it belongs to the bearer. You find it, it’s yours.”
Why did Lily immediately want to go home and sign her ticket? “What are the chances of finding a winning lottery ticket, Grandma?”
“Better than the chances of winning one,” replied Claudia in a no-nonsense voice. “So how is that Amy? She’s the one who spent last Thanksgiving with us instead of that no-good boyfriend of yours? How is he?”
Are there any men who are not no-good? Lily wondered but was too sheepish to ask, since it appeared that her grandmother was right at least about Joshua. It was time she told her. “She is fine, and … we’re no longer together. He moved out a month ago.”
For a moment her grandmother was silent, and then she threw up her arms to the ceiling. “So there is a God,” she said.
Lily’s face must not have registered the same level of boundless joy because Claudia said, “Oh, come on. You should be glad to be rid of him.”
“Well … not as glad as you.”
“He’s a bum. You would have supported him for the rest of your life, the way your sister supports her no-good boyfriend.”—and then without a break—“Is Amy graduating with you in a few weeks?”
“Not with me,” said Lily evasively. She didn’t want to lie, but she also didn’t want to tell her grandmother that Amy was actually graduating.
“When is it exactly?”
“May 28, I think.”
“You think?”
“Everything is all right, Grandma, don’t worry.”
“Come in the living room,” Claudia said. “I want to talk to you about something. Not about the war. I’ll save that for Saturday’s poker game.” She smiled. “Are you coming?”
“Can’t. Have to work.” They sat on the sofa covered in plastic. “Grandma, you live here, why don’t you take the Mylar off? That’s what people do when they live someplace. They take the plastic off.”
“I don’t want to dirty all my furniture. After all, you’ll be getting it when I die. Yes, yes, don’t protest. I’m leaving all my furniture to you. You don’t have any. Now stop shaking your head and look what I have for you.”
Lily looked. In her fingers, Grandmother held an airplane ticket.
“Where am I going?”
“Maui.”
Lily shook her head. “Oh, no. Absolutely not.”
“Yes, Lily. Don’t you want to see Hawaii?”
“No! I mean, yes, but I can’t.”
“I got you an open-ended ticket. Go whenever you want for as long as you want. Probably best to go soon though, before you get a real job. It’ll be good for you.”
“No, it won’t.”
“It will. You’re looking worn around the gills lately. Like you haven’t slept. Go get a tan.”
“Don’t want sleep, don’t want a tan, don’t want to go.”
“It’ll be good for your mother.”
“No, it won’t. And what about my job?”
“What, the Noho Star is the only diner in Manhattan?”
“I don’t want to get another waitressing job.”
Claudia squeezed Lily’s hands. “You need to be thinking beyond waitressing, Liliput. You’re graduating college. After six years, finally! But right now your mother could use you in Hawaii.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Let’s just say,” Grandma said evasively, “I think she’s feeling lonely. Amanda is busy with her family, Anne is busy, I don’t even know with what. Oh, I know she pretends she works, but then why is she always broke? Your brother, he’s busy, too, but since he’s actually running our country, I’ll give him a break for not calling his own mother more often. Your mother is feeling very isolated.”
“But Papi is with her. He retired to be with her!”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know how that whole retirement thing is working out. Besides you know your father. Even when he’s there, he’s not there.”
“We told them not to move to Hawaii. We told them about rock fever, we told them about isolation. We told them.”
“So? They’re sixty. You’re twenty-four and you don’t listen. Why should they listen?”
“Because we were right.”
“Oh, Liliput, if everyone listened to the people who were right there would be no grief in the world, and yet—do you want me to go through last week with you again?”
“No, no.”
“Was there grief?”
“Some, yes.”
“Go to your mother. Or mark my words—there will be grief there, too.”
Lily struggled up off the 1940s saran-wrap-covered yellow and yellowing couch that someday would be hers. “There’s grief there aplenty, Grandma.”
She was vacillating on Hawaii as she vacillated on everything—painstakingly. Amy was insistent that Lily should definitely go. Paul thought she should go. Rachel thought she probably should go. Rick at Noho Star said he would give her a month off if she went now before all the kids came back from college and it got busy for the summer.
She called her brother over the weekend to see what he thought, and his wife picked up the phone and said, “Oh, it’s you.” And then Lily heard into the phone, “ANDREW! It’s your sister!” and when her brother said something, Miera answered, “The one who always needs money.” And Andrew came on the phone laughing, and said, “Miera, you have to be more specific than that.”
Lily laughed herself. “Andrew, I need no money. I need advice.”
“I’m rich on that. I’ll even throw you a couple of bucks if you want.”
His voice always made her smile. Her whole life it made her smile. “Can you see me for lunch this week?”
“Can’t, Congress is in session. What’s up? I was going to call you myself. You won’t believe who’s staying with me.”
“Where?”
“In D.C.”
“Who?”
“Our father, Lil.”
“What?”
“Yup.”
“He’s in D.C.? Why?”
“Aren’t you the journalist’s daughter with the questions. Why, I don’t know. He left Maui with two big suitcases. I think he is thinking of un-retiring. His exact words? ‘No big deal, son. I’m just here to smooth out the transition for Greenberger who’s taking over for me.’”
“Meaning …”
“Meaning, I can’t take another day with your mother.”
“Oh, Andrew, oh, dear.” Lily dug her nails into the palms of her hands. “No wonder Grandma bought me a ticket to go to Maui. She’s so cagey, that Grandma. She never comes out and tells me exactly what she wants. She is always busy manipulating.”
“Yes, she wants you to do what she wants you to do but out of your own accord.”
“Fat chance of that. When is Papi going back? I don’t want to go unless he’s there.”
“You’ll be waiting your whole life. I don’t think he’s going back.”
“Stop it.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m home, why?”
“Are you … alone?”
“Yes.” Lily lowered her voice. “What do you want to tell me?”
“Are you sitting … listening?”
“Yes.”
“Go to Maui now, Liliput. I can’t believe I’m saying this. But you should go. Really. Get out of the city for a while.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this. I don’t see you going.”
“I’d go if I weren’t swamped. Quartered first, but I’d go.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Did I mention … gladly quartered?”
After having a good chuckle, Andrew and Lily made a deal—he would work on their father in D.C. in between chairing the appropriations committee and filibustering bill 2740 on farm subsidies, and she would go and soothe their mother in between sunbathing and tearing her hair out.
“Andrew, is it true what I heard from Amanda, are you running for the U.S. Senate seat in the fall?”
“I’m thinking about it. I’m exploring my options, putting together a commission. Don’t want to do it if I can’t win.”
“Oh, Andrew. What can I do? I’ll campaign for you again. Me and Amy.”
“Oh, you girls will be too busy with your new lives to help me in the fall, leaving school, getting real jobs. But thanks anyway. I gotta go. I’ll call you in Maui. You want me to wire you some money?”
“Yes, please. A thousand? I’ll pay you back.”
“I’m sure. Is that why you keep buying lottery tickets every week? To pay me back?”
“You know,” said Lily, “I’ve stopped buying those lottery tickets. I love you.”
“Love you, too, kid.”
2 (#ulink_c8b5c43e-3960-5d6f-9d1f-ac73602037da)
Hawaii (#ulink_c8b5c43e-3960-5d6f-9d1f-ac73602037da)
Hawaii was not Poland. It was not the wetlands of northern Danzig, rainy, cold, swampy, mosquito-infested Danzig whence Allison had sprung during war. Hawaii was the anti-Poland. Two years ago Lily’s mother and father had gone on an investigative trip to Maui and came back at the end of a brief visit with a $200,000 condo. Apparently they learned everything they could about Maui in two weeks—how much they loved it, how beautiful it was, how clean, how quiet, how fresh the mangoes, how delicious the raw tuna, how warm the water, and how much they would enjoy their retirement there.
Lily knew how her father was taking to his retirement, enjoying it now in his only son’s congressional apartment in the nation’s capital.
How her mother was taking to Hawaii Lily also could not tell right away because her mother was not there to pick her up from Kahului airport. After she had waited a suitable amount of time—which was not a second over ninety minutes—she called her mother, who had come on the phone and sounded as if she had been sleeping. Lily took a taxi. The narrow road between the mountain pass leading to the Kihei and Wailea side of Maui where her parents lived was pretty but was somehow made less attractive by Lily’s crankiness at her mother’s non-appearance. She rang the doorbell for several minutes and then ended up having to pay the cab driver herself ($35!!!—the equivalent of all tips for a four-hour morning shift). After ringing the bell, Lily tried the door and found it open. Her mother was in the bedroom asleep on top of the bed and would not be awakened.
Some hours later, Allison stumbled out of her room. Lily was watching TV.
“You’re here,” she said, holding on to the railing that led down two steps from the hallway to the sunken living-room.
Lily stood up. “Mom, you were supposed to pick me up from the airport.”
“I didn’t know you were coming today,” said her mother. “I thought you were coming tomorrow.” She spoke slowly. She was wearing a house robe and her short hair was gray—she had stopped coloring it. Her face was puffy, her eyes nearly swollen closed.
Lily was going to raise her voice, say a few stern things, but her mother looked terrible. She wasn’t used to that. Her mother was usually perfectly coiffed, perfectly made up, perfectly dressed, perfect. Lily turned her frustrated gaze back to the TV. Allison stood for a moment, then squared her shoulders and left the living room. Soon Lily got up and went to bed in her father’s room. Of course Grandma was right—something needed fixing. But Lily was the child, and Allison was the mother. The child wasn’t supposed to fix the mother. The mother was supposed to fix the child. That was the natural order of things in the universe.
The next morning Allison came out, all showered and fresh, with mascara and lipstick on her face. Her hair was brushed, pulled back, her eyebrows were tweezed. There was even polish on the nails. She apologized for yesterday’s mishap, and made Lily eggs and coffee as they talked about Lily’s life a little bit, and it was then that Lily broke the bad news that she didn’t think she would be graduating this year because she didn’t think she had enough credits.
“How many credits are you short?” asked Allison.
“A few.”
“Wait till your father finds out.”
“Mom, you can’t still be threatening me with my father. I’m twenty-four.”
“Have you noticed by the way that your father isn’t here?”
Lily coughed. “I’ve noticed. Andrew told me he’s in D.C.”
Now Allison coughed. “Yes, whatever. He said he was going on freelance business. He said Andrew asked him for help in preparation for the fall campaign. It’s all lies. That’s all they both do, is lie.” Turning away, she got up and went away into her bedroom. When Lily knocked to ask if she was coming to the beach, Allison said she wasn’t feeling up to going.
The Mauian beach couldn’t help but erase some of the bad taste in Lily’s mouth. She imagined being here with Joshua, having money, a car, snorkeling, whale watching, biking at dawn to volcanoes, hiking in rainforests, swimming in water that in her great enthusiasm felt like liquid gold. It was enough to get her good and properly depressed about her own situation and to forget her mother and what more could one want from paradise, but to forget your mother’s troubles and remember your own?
Strangely, Hawaii was able to overcome even romantic disillusionments, for it looked and smelled and felt as if God were watching from up close. She had never seen water so green or the sky so blue, or the rhododendrons so red. She had never seen anyone happier than a guy who was swinging on a hammock in his backyard on the ocean and reading his book. Lily didn’t know how he could be reading. You couldn’t look away from that ocean. She was not hot, and when she walked into the water she was not cold. The water and the air were the same temperature. When she finished swimming and came out, she did not feel wet. She thought she could not get a suntan in weather that felt so mild, yet when she pulled away the strap of her bathing suit, she saw white underneath it, and next to it skin that was decidedly not white. That made her incredulous and happy and when she returned she was ready for rapprochement.
But in the darkened condo, Allison was still lying down, and Lily, not wanting to disturb her mother, went into her own room. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon.
She had a nap, and at six when she came out, her mother, her hair all done, and her make-up on, was ironing a skirt in the living room. “Come on, do you have anything nice to wear? Or do you want me to lend you something? I’ll take you to a wonderful oceanside café your father and I go to sometimes. It’s dressy, though, can’t go there in that little bikini you’re wearing.”
“I have a dress.”
“Well, let’s go. They have great lobster.”
All dressed and perfumed they went. Watching her mother walk in so elegant, so slim, so tall in her high-heeled shoes, smile at the host and be escorted on his arm to their beachside table, Lily thought that her father was right—when Allison was on, there was no woman in the room, regardless of age, more beautiful. Anne, Amanda, Lily, they inherited some of their mother’s remarkable physical traits, but parceled out, not in total, whereas their mother had all her remarkable physical traits to herself. The thick, wavy, auburn hair, the wide apart, slightly slanted gray eyes, the regal nose, the high cheekbones, the perfect mouth, elegant and slender like the rest of her. Amanda got the hair and the nose, Anne got the height and the cheekbones and the slimness. Anne got a lot. Lily got no height, no cheekbones, no hair, and no gray eyes. She got the slant of the eyes and a certain fluid grace of the mouth and the neck and the arms.
Before the water was poured, Allison said, “I’m not feeling well, Lil. This medicine I’m taking for my stomach is making me feel awful. I don’t know why I’m taking it.”
“Why are you?”
“Why, why. Because the doctor told me to, that’s why. I have a great problem with my stomach. You know how sick I am.”
Lily stared straight ahead. Ten years ago, Allison had an emergency operation for a perforated ulcer.
Ten years ago!
“You didn’t ask about Joshua, Mom.”
“How is that Joshua?”
“We broke up. Rather, he broke up with me.”
“He did? Why? I thought you got along so well.” She managed to inflect but just barely.
“Not really. I wasn’t a good enough listener for him, I think. All he wanted to do was talk about himself.”
“Ah, well. You’ll find somebody else. You’re still so young.” She sighed operatically. “Not like me. I’m so depressed, Lily.”
Of course you are. “Mom, how can you be depressed in a place like this? Look all around you.” Where depression was loss of color, Hawaii was color’s surfeit.
“Oh, what’s Hawaii to me? I’m so unhappy. Don’t you know you carry what’s inside you wherever you go?”
Lily supposed. For Hemingway, Paris was a moveable feast. For her grandmother it was Poland—one word synonymous with apocalypse and kielbasa. Lily’s mother’s moveable feast was misery.
Not this conversation again. “Why are you unhappy?” she said, trying to inflect, trying and failing, trying not to let lifelong impatience creep into her voice. “Why are you unhappy? You have a beautiful life. You don’t have to work. You don’t have to worry about money. You can travel, you can read, you can swim, fish, snorkel. You have all your faculties, plus a husband who loves you.”
Allison sighed again.
“Mom, Papi loves you.”
“Oh, Lily, you’re so naïve.” She shook her head and looked into her food. “What is this love you talk about? Once, your father and I, true, we had love. But that was a long time ago.” Allison gnashed on her teeth. “Your father is very cruel. You don’t even know.”
Their lobster was brought. Lily tried to remember her first sixteen years of life with her mother and father. “Papi’s not cruel.” Papi was too passive to be cruel, she wanted to say.
“This is what I mean about naïve! How can I even talk to you about this if you won’t listen to me.”
“I’m listening,” said Lily, but wished she weren’t. She kept picking at her lobster with a fork. Her mother stopped eating completely.
“Your father is very controlling, very unkind. And he doesn’t understand my depression, he doesn’t understand how unhappy I am, and worse, he doesn’t care. He is like you—he says, what do you have to be depressed about.”
“Mom,” Lily said quietly. “Answer me. Answer him. What do you have to be depressed about?”
Tears appeared in Allison’s eyes. “My whole life is a complete failure.”
“Why do you say this?” Lily wished she could be more outraged. She wanted to be outraged. If this were the first time she was hearing it, she might be. Soon her mother would wave off mention of the four children she had ably raised, of the six grandchildren she had, of the various happy lives of her offspring, of her son, the congressman! She would bring forth mention of a job she didn’t get when she became pregnant with Lily, as if that job would have been the panacea for the ills of the currently afflicted. She would bring forth Lily’s father, and how Allison’s whole life had revolved around him. “He was the tree under whose shadow we all fell.”
Did Allison just say that, or was the voice inside Lily’s head so frigging loud?
She looked up at her mother, who nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s true, you, too, Lily, you, too, were under his shadow. Under his and Andrew’s. I don’t know why you girls love Andrew so much, he was never there for you. Especially for you. He would take you out once a month to the movies, and you thought he was a gift from God, why? I would spend all day, every day with you, parks, bike rides, ice skating, movies, book stores, and I never got you to look at me with a hundredth of the affection you looked at him. And you ask me why I’m bitter.”
“I didn’t ask,” Lily said.
“My son—is he all right, by the way? Now that his father is not here, he stopped calling.”
“He doesn’t call anybody.”
“What’s your excuse? Or your sisters’? None of you ever call me. Amanda has more kids than anybody and she calls me the most, and that’s hardly ever. Just you wait, wait till you’re my age. I hope God will give you daughters as ungrateful as yourself.”
To say Lily wished she were anywhere but here would have been like saying she preferred to sleep in a comfortable bed rather than on a bed of rusty nails.
“Mom,” she said, “you could be in New York, seeing us every week. But you moved to Hawaii. What do you want?”
“To die,” said Allison. “Sometimes that’s all I want, relief from the blackness.” She took Lily’s hand. “Daughter, I think of killing myself sometimes, but I’m too afraid of God. I think of killing myself every day.”
Lily took her hand away. Did this, or did this not, count as psychological abuse? “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”
“Daughters are supposed to be friends to their mothers in their old age.”
“I think they’re supposed to be daughters first. I can’t believe you’re telling me you want to die. Do you understand how wrong that is?” If only it had been the first time she were hearing it. But she had a vivid memory of being thirteen years old when her mother took her into the bedroom and told her calmly that she only had three months to live. Still, every time Lily heard it, it sounded like the first time. It felt like the first time.
“I’m not telling you to upset you. I’m telling you so you can be prepared. So you know that it wasn’t out of the blue. Your father, if he was a different man, maybe my life would be different. If only he understood me, sympathized with me.”
“Ma, Papi put food on our table for over forty years. Fed us, clothed us, paid for our college.”
“Could barely afford City College for you,” said Allison. “Didn’t have anything left for you.”
“City College is fine,” said Lily.
“And you’re repaying his kindness by refusing to graduate. You know we can’t afford to keep you. We pay for your apartment and for your grandmother’s house, and taxes and maintenance for this condo. We’re completely broke because we’re keeping three different homes.”
“I’ll get more hours at Noho Star. I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, but your grandmother, what about her? She’s not going anywhere, is she?”
“Guess not. Guess your mother is not going anywhere.”
Allison said nothing, but busied herself in pretending to pull out pieces of her lobster. “I can’t believe you haven’t graduated. Six years completely down the toilet. Six years of college so you can wash dishes at a diner. Well, I hope you’re a good dishwasher. Certainly you’ve had enough education to be the very best.”
Lily did not eat one more bite of her lobster. What had Andrew said, she should go to Maui and soothe their mother? Had anyone in the history of the universe ever had such a dumb idea? She was the exact wrong person for that sort of thing. Lily couldn’t soothe her mother into a massage.
And the next afternoon when she knocked on her mother’s door to ask her to come to the beach, Allison was lying down. “I’ve been to the beach. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“You haven’t been to the beach with me. Come.”
“Leave me alone, will you?” said Allison. “You’re just like your father. Stop forcing me into your pointless regimens.”
Lily went alone. How could she manage even another day?
But it’s Hawaii, Hawaii! The rainforests, the volcanoes. What would she prefer, yesterday’s dinner conversation, or the beach by herself? The choice was so clear.
And so it was the beach by herself, and lunch, and walks through the palms, and the sunsets, and the community pool at the condo.
Days went by. Concentration drained out of Lily. She was unable to focus long enough to sketch. She kept rendering the same palms over and over. Charcoal was an insult to Hawaii, watercolors did not do justice to Hawaii, and oil paints she did not have, nor a canvas for them. All she had was her charcoal pencils and her sketchbook, and there was nothing to draw in Maui with charcoal except the inside of her mother’s colorless apartment and the numbers 1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49.
Andrew had not called to tell her how it was going with Papi. Amy had not called. She had not heard from Joshua.
For hours during the day, Lily busied her mind with being blighted with the lottery ticket. Cursed.
Simply, this is what she believed: she believed that the universe showed each of us certain things, that it made certain things open.
Many people lived a peaceful life with nothing ever happening to them. But into some families other things fell. Some families were afflicted with random tragedies—car accidents, plane accidents, hang gliding accidents, bus crashes, knifings, drownings, scarves getting caught under the wheels of their Rolls Royces, breaking their necks. The lovely girl in the prom dress standing in the dance hall and suddenly a titanium steel pipe from above breaking, falling on her, impaling her through the skull on her prom night! The valedictorian high school graduate headed to Cornell, standing on the street corner in New York City, suddenly finding himself in the middle of a robbery. A stray bullet—the only bullet fired—hitting him, killing him. Lily was not worried about old age or hereditary illness, she was worried about portholes of the universe opening up and demons swallowing her.
Lily believed that the portholes that allowed random tragedy to fall in were also the portholes that allowed lottery tickets to fall in. Out of control SUVs at state fairs. A sunspot in your eye, and wham, your child is dead. Plane crashes, ten-car collisions, freak lightning storms, fatal infections from a harmless day at the farm, and 1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49. All from the same place. All leading to the same place—destruction.
And Lily Quinn prided herself all her life on being exactly the kind of girl who’d never won a single thing. Her karma had been being not just an un-winner, but the anti-winner. In fact, she could be sure that if she picked it, it would never win. She couldn’t win so much as a pack of cigarettes on a free tour of the Philip Morris tobacco factory in North Carolina. She couldn’t win a no-homework weekend when there were only ten entrants and the professor picked three names. She didn’t win the short or the long straw. She didn’t get to lose and clean the toilet, or come up to the headmaster and ask for more gruel, any more than she got to win a prize at a baby shower contest. She played a game at her sister’s shower called, “How well do you know your sister?”—and came in third!
49—for the year her mother and grandmother came to America.
45—for the year of the end of the war that changed the world.
39—for its beginning.
24—for her age. Last year Lily played 23.
18—Because it was her favorite number.
1—because it was the loneliest number.
She bought herself a lottery ticket every single week for six years, playing the numbers that meant something to her not because she had hope, but because she wanted to reaffirm the order of her quiet universe. Because she truly believed that the Force that let her numbers never be pulled out of a hat at Saturday night’s drawing was the same Force that did not place the titanium rod at her two feet of life.
Unable to draw or read or focus, Lily concentrated all her efforts on getting a tan. In a secluded part of a small semi-circle of the local beach near Wailea, Lily took off her bikini halter and sunbathed topless, getting a very thorough tan indeed. After almost three weeks her breasts looked positively Brazilian and even her nipples got dark brown.
In the first week of June, Lily was sitting outside on the patio, home from the beach, thinking about what to do for the rest of her day—for the day was so loooong—when the phone rang. The phone never rang! Lily was so excited, she nearly knocked over a chair getting to it.
“Hello?” she said in an eager-lover voice.
“Lilianne Quinn?” said an unfamiliar man’s baritone on the other end.
“Yes?” she said, much more subdued, in a voice unfamiliar to herself.
“This is Detective O’Malley of the NYPD. I’m calling about your roommate, Amy McFadden.”
Excitement was instantly supplanted by something else—worry. “Yes? What’s happened?” From his tone, Lily thought Amy might have been in a car accident.
“Have you heard from her?”
“No.” She paused. “I’m here in Hawaii.”
“Well, I know,” said the detective. “I’m calling you there, aren’t I?”
That was true. “What’s happened?”
“She seems to have disappeared.”
“Oh.” Lily immediately calmed down. “Hmm. Have you checked with her mother?”
“Her mother is the one who reported her missing, which is why I’m calling you. According to Jan McFadden, Amy hasn’t called home in three weeks. Their repeated attempts to reach her at the apartment have failed. Do you recall the last time you saw her?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said, deflecting. “I’d have to think about it.”
There was silence on the other end. “Are you thinking about it now?”
“Detective, I don’t know. I’ve been here three weeks. I guess I saw her right before I left.”
“When was that?”
“I … I can’t remember now.” Dates had been singed out of her head by the Tropic of Cancer sun. “Can I think about it and call you back?”
“Yes—but quickly.”
“Or …” Something occurred to Lily. “Do you think I should come back? Is this something you need to speak to me about in person?”
“I’m not sure. Is it?”
“Yes, yes, I think I should come back. I’ll be able to give you much more detail.”
“Well, I appreciate that, Miss Quinn. This seems quite serious.”
Lily didn’t think so, but then this detective didn’t know Amy.
“You need me to come back right away? The sooner the better?”
“Well—”
“Of course. This is an emergency. I’ll be glad to be of any help. I’ll fly back tonight. Is that soon enough?”
“Yes, I think that will be fine. I apologize for having you leave Hawaii. You don’t really—”
“No, no, I do. It’s really no problem. I want to help. Where do I go?”
“Come to the 9th Precinct on 5th Street between First and Second Avenues. Ask for me.”
“Who are you again?”
“Lieutenant-detective O’Malley. Spencer Patrick O’Malley.”
Lily called United Airlines to find out about the next available flight: it was in four hours. It took her forty-five minutes to pack, then she called a cab.
She carried her suitcase out with difficulty. Her mother was on the patio, smoking, drinking cranberry juice.
“I have to go back to New York. Something … something’s happened,” she said, and didn’t want to give voice to anything more. “That was the police on the phone.”
“Police? What’s happened? What did you do?”
“Nothing, but … no one can find Amy. The police want to talk to me.”
“They can’t talk to you on the phone?”
“No. I guess it’s serious.” Lily said it, but didn’t believe it for a second.
She wasn’t worried about Amy. She thought Amy’s disappearance was a beautiful karmic ruse to get her out of Maui.
She threw herself into the cab with relieved haste. When the plane was in the air heading back home she found herself exhaling for the first time in three weeks. She was sure Amy would have turned up by the time she got home.
3 (#ulink_60288ed6-1486-5fea-883d-d9cddeaaea9d)
An Hour at the 9th Precinct (#ulink_60288ed6-1486-5fea-883d-d9cddeaaea9d)
Amy hadn’t turned up by the time Lily got home, but their apartment looked as if the police expected to find Amy in Lily’s closet. A copy of the warrant was plastered to the wall in the hallway. Nothing obvious had been disturbed in Lily’s room—though she had the feeling that all her things had been looked at, even touched—but Amy’s room had been turned upside down.
Without even unpacking, still in her traveling clothes—a white spaghetti-strap tank top, a small cropped cream cardigan, and a denim mini-skirt, Lily dropped her suitcase and left for the precinct. She gave her name and waited ten minutes before a heavy, out-of-breath man came downstairs. “Detective O’Malley?” she said, sticking out her hand.
“No, no, my partner always sends me. He thinks I need the exercise,” the man puffed.
His hand was wet and clammy and unpleasant. She pulled hers away. “How thoughtful of your partner,” said Lily, warily eying him, a little bit relieved that this detective wasn’t the lead detective. He had a sour, greasy look about him, his thin, long, scraggly hair needed washing, or at best combing; he was very tall, but was ungainly about his limbs, listing slightly to the right, his head bobbing slightly to the left. His paunch was so large that the white dress shirt he was wearing couldn’t contain it, and both, the shirt and the belly, were spilling over the top of the pants, onto the belt and downwards. Lily almost felt like telling him to tuck himself in. He didn’t look jovial and jolly though; he was not a happy fat man.
“Detective Harkman,” said the panting man, then motioning her to follow him. As he walked by her, she smelled what she knew unmistakably to be uric acid. Detective Harkman had gout—his body couldn’t metabolize the nitrogenous wastes properly, hence the sour smell emanating from him. Her paternal grandfather had had it at the end of his life. Involuntarily she held her breath as she followed him three flights up (“What, no elevators?” she quipped. “It’s either elevators or our salaries,” he unquipped back.) and was out of breath herself when they entered a high-ceilinged plain open room with a dozen wooden cluttered desks, behind one of which sat a man, who was not heavy or out of breath.
“Lilianne Quinn?” The man stood up and extended his hand. “I’m Detective O’Malley.” He did not have gout.
She looked up at him. Her handshake must have seemed formal, uncertain, and mushy compared to his, which was casual, certain and un-mushy. Despite the moist heat in the room, his hand was dry.
Lily was usually good with ages, but Detective O’Malley she couldn’t quite place. He moved young—he had a wiry build that came either from sports or from not eating—but his eyes were old. He looked to be somewhere around forty, and somewhere beyond a sense of humor, though that could have been an affect—affecting to be serious in front of her. He had lots of light brown hair, graying slightly at the temples and was wearing black metal-rimmed glasses. His gray suit jacket was hanging evenly on the back of his chair. His nondescript gray tie was loosened, and the top two buttons of his tucked-in white dress shirt unbuttoned. All the windows in the open room were flung ajar and there was a hot breeze coming through in the early evening. He buttoned his shirt after he stood up, fixed his tie and put his jacket back on; Lily noticed the massive black pistol in his holster. “Why don’t we go in here,” he said, pointing to a door that said Interrogation #1.
He was half the width of his partner though Lily couldn’t tell if O’Malley seemed thin simply by comparison. No, he was definitely thin, and he didn’t look like he had time for sports. His desk was stacked a foot high with files and papers. Maybe he played a little baseball. He looked fast like a shortstop. Did shortstops wear glasses? Perhaps he played soccer? Thus occupying her slightly anxious brain with idle observations and impressions, she followed him, with Detective Harkman panting behind. She hoped the room would be air-conditioned, but she found it to be heated by a whooshing large fan that spun the hot air around her in a clammy vortex. She resisted the impulse of sticking her head out the open window and panting like a Labrador. Her cardigan was too hot for this room, but she wasn’t about to take it off in front of two police officers, leaving herself in a barely-there top.
Detective O’Malley invited her to sit down (she did) and asked her if she wanted something to drink (she said no, though she did). He began without waiting. Drumming a pencil next to his notebook on top of the table, he put up his feet on the chair next to him. “Okay, tell me what you know.”
“Well, nothing.” Lily nearly stammered. What kind of a question was that? “About what?”
“About where Amy is.”
“I don’t know that.”
“Why aren’t you concerned? Her mother is out of her mind with worry. Amy didn’t go to her college graduation. You—didn’t attend either, I take it?”
“Um—no.” She wasn’t going to be telling a stranger, was she, why she had not attended. But the detective knew she was in Hawaii, he knew she couldn’t have attended. Her eyes narrowed at him. His eyes widened in response. They were extremely blue. They seemed to know things, understand things without her opening her mouth. Then why were they staring back at her, expecting an answer?
“Why not?” he asked.
Oh, here we go. “Unlike Amy, I’m not officially graduated.” Lily cleared her throat. “I have some credits still to take.”
“You’re not a senior?”
“Yes. Just not a”—she lowered her gaze to study the complexities in the grain of the wooden table—“a graduating senior.”
“I see.”
She wasn’t looking at him so she couldn’t tell if he saw. Oh, she bet he understood everything. He just wanted to watch her squirm.
“How old are you, Miss Quinn?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Did you two start college late? Amy is also twenty-four.”
“I didn’t start late, I just … kept going.”
He was observing her. “For six years?”
“For six years, yes.”
“And still not graduated?”
“Not quite.”
“I see.” He switched subjects then, as if they were file folders lying on his desk. “So—you didn’t go to your graduation, because you weren’t graduating. Fair enough. But Amy didn’t go either, and she was graduating.”
“Hmm.” That was surprising. Lily had no answer to it.
“Were you and Amy close?”
“We were, yes. Are I mean. Are.” She paused and decided to take the direct approach. “You’re confusing me.”
“Not deliberately, Miss Quinn. So what were you doing in Hawaii?”
“Sunbathing looks like,” said Harkman from behind her.
Detective O’Malley didn’t say anything, but in between the blinks of his eyes, behind his black-rimmed glasses, his flicker of an expression made Lily blush, almost as if … he could see her sunsoaked brown nipples.
Pulling the cardigan closed, she looked down at the table and bit her lip. “My parents. I went to visit my mother.”
“You left when?”
“On the Thursday morning, very early. My flight was at eight. I took a cab to JFK at six in the morning.”
“Was Amy up?”
“No.”
“Was Amy home?”
“I think so. I didn’t check her room, if that’s what you mean.”
“So she could’ve not been home?”
“She could’ve not been, but—”
“So the last time you actually saw her would be …”
“Wednesday night, May 12.”
“Had time to recall some dates since our phone call?”
Lily lifted her gaze. Detective O’Malley’s eyes stared at her unflinchingly from his clean-shaven, calm, angular face, and she suddenly got the feeling that the firm and casual handshake was a ruse, was an affect, that she should be very careful with the things she said to this detective because he might remember every syllable.
“Yes.” She crossed her arms. “Initially I had been taken aback by your phone call.”
“That’s understandable. Did she seem normal to you that Wednesday?”
“Yes. She seemed the same as always.”
“Which is how?”
“I don’t know. Normal.” How did one describe a normal evening with Amy? Lily became flummoxed. “She was her usual self. We drank a little, talked a little.”
“About what?”
“Nothing. Everything. Movies. Finals. Really, just … regular girl things.”
“Boyfriends?”
“Mmm.” Lily didn’t want to tell this detective about her pathetic love life, and since that’s all the boyfriends they talked about, she couldn’t tell the detective anything. “We talked about our mothers.”
Detective Harkman stood behind Lily and every once in a while, Detective O’Malley would glance at him for a silent exchange and then look back at her. Now was one of those times.
“Then you left …”
“And I haven’t heard from Amy since.”
“You never called to tell her how you were getting on in Maui?”
“I did, a couple of times, I left messages on the machine, but she never called me back.”
“How many times would you say you called her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe three?”
“Three?”
“Around three.”
“So possibly two, possibly four?”
“Possibly.” Lily lowered her head. She didn’t know what he wanted from her.
“Does she have a cell phone?”
“No.”
“Do you?”
“No. I can’t afford one. I don’t know why she doesn’t have one.”
“So you called a few times, she didn’t call back, and you gave up?”
“I didn’t give up. I was going to call again. I was even thinking of calling at her mother’s house.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t remember the number.”
“Did she tell you of her plans to visit her mother the weekend you flew to Hawaii?”
“I don’t remember her telling me anything like that, no. Did she go visit her mother that weekend?”
“No,” said the detective. “What time did you call her?”
“In the evenings, I think.”
“Your evenings?”
“What? Yes. Yes, my evenings. Midnight Hawaii time. Before I went to bed, I’d call.”
O’Malley paused before he said, “Hawaii is six hours behind New York.”
Lily paused, too. “Yes.”
“So your midnight would be six in the morning New York time?”
“Yes.” Lily coughed. “I guess I should have been more considerate.”
“Maybe,” O’Malley said non-committally. “What I’m really interested in, though, is Amy not picking up the phone at six in the morning.”
“She could have been out.”
“Out where?”
“Well, I don’t know, do I? Perhaps she was sleeping.”
“Perhaps she could have called you back, Miss Quinn. Would you like to know how many times the caller ID showed your Hawaiian phone number on the display? Twenty-seven. Morning, noon and night is when you called her. The answering machine in your apartment had nine messages from you to Amy. The first one was on Sunday, May 16, the last one was after you and I spoke, on June third.”
Lily, flustered and confounded, sat silently. Was she caught in a lie? She did call a few times. And she did leave some messages. But nine? She recalled some of those messages. “Ames, ohmigod!!! I can’t take another day. This mother of mine, call me, call me back, call me.” “Ames, how long have I been here, it feels like five years, and I’m the one who is sixty. Call me to tell me I’m still young.” “Amy, where in hell are you? I need you. Call me.” “I’m going home, home, home, I can’t take another minute. My dad is not here, just me and my crazy mom. If I don’t talk to you I’ll turn into her.” “Amy, in case you’ve forgotten, this is your roommate and best friend Lily Quinn. That’s L-I-L-Y Q-U-I-N-N.”
She was profoundly embarrassed. Strangers, police officers, detectives, these two men, this grown-up man listening to her sophomoric jabberings, her tumult and frustration on an answering machine!
Harkman panted behind her, sneezed once, she hoped it wasn’t on her. Detective O’Malley at last said, as if speaking directly to her humiliations, “Okay, let’s move on.”
Yes, let’s. But Lily didn’t know what to say. Harkman’s gaze prickled the back of her neck. She felt intensely uncomfortable. O’Malley’s hands were pressed together at the fingertips, making the shape of a teepee as he continued to study her. Lily couldn’t take it anymore, she looked away from him and down at her own twitching hands and noticed that a small cut near her knuckle was oozing blood.
“Miss Quinn, are you bleeding? Chris, can you please get this young lady a tissue. Or would you prefer a first-aid kit? When did you cut yourself?”
Lily didn’t want to be evasive, considering the amount of fresh blood that was coming out of an old wound, but she couldn’t tell him when. “It’s an old thing,” she muttered. “It’s nothing.”
Harkman came back with cotton wool and a bandage. Lily dabbed at the cut, feeling ridiculous.
O’Malley said, “You might want to get that checked out.”
“No, it’s fine.”
“Well, Miss Quinn, it may seem fine to you, this ability to bleed spontaneously, but you weren’t bleeding when you first came in here, and the bright color of your blood tells me you may be anemic.”
“Yes, I’ve always been a little anemic.” She emitted a throaty laugh. “Never could donate blood.”
He wrote something down in his notebook, not paying attention to her. “I just have a couple more questions, if you think you’re all right to go on.”
“I’m fine.”
“Tell me, did Amy have any enemies?”
“Enemies? We’re college girls!”
“The answer is no then? You can just reply in the negative.”
“No.” In the smallest voice.
“What about a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Was she seeing anyone at all? Casually?”
Lily said, “What kind of a question is that?”
O’Malley stopped looking into his notebook and looked up at her. “I’m not interested in passing judgment. Now was she or wasn’t she?”
“Well, she’s single, so … yes.”
“Did she ever stay overnight somewhere else?”
“Once in a while.”
“How often?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know that either.”
O’Malley exchanged another look with Harkman. What, Lily wanted to exclaim, what are you looking at each other for? What am I not telling you? She glanced back at Harkman herself. She started to actively dislike his eyes, which she realized were like two small, round, ugly drill holes. They were lost on his big, round, double-chinned face, but boy did they manage to bore into the back of her friggin’ head.
“How did you meet Amy, Miss Quinn?” asked O’Malley.
“We met in an art class at college almost two years ago.”
“Did you become good friends?”
“We moved in together, didn’t we?”
“Don’t get testy with me. I know it’s been a long day. You could have moved in for financial reasons. You could have hated Amy’s guts. I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“Yes, we became friends, then we found this apartment, and moved in together.” Just to make sure there was no wrong impression, Lily said, “My boyfriend lived with us for a few months.”
“Three of you in that tiny apartment?” O’Malley whistled. “Why did Amy get the larger bedroom then?”
“Why? Because when we were moving in, we drew for it, and I got the short straw.” She let that sink in—Lily never got the long straw, but sometimes she got the short straw.
“I see. And during your living together, has Amy had many boyfriends?”
“I don’t know. What do you consider many?”
O’Malley raised his eye brows. “What I consider to be many, how is that relevant, Miss Quinn?”
Why was he flustering her! “Like I said, she would see people sporadically, on and off. No one serious.”
“Not a single serious boyfriend?”
“No.” Why was that strange? It wasn’t strange. Amy was always looking for love. She just wasn’t lucky like good old Lily with good old Joshua. But there was a formless memory wedged in of something—Lily didn’t even know what. A sense of something that Lily could not then or now place. She didn’t know if it actually involved Amy, or love, but for some reason she thought so—and cold damp and flashing lights. What a strange thing to think of at a time like this. Lily shook her head to shake off the oddness of it.
“That’s interesting. Because while we were waiting for you to return from Maui, we interviewed a number of people, among them a girl named Rachel Ortiz. Do you know her?”
“Yes, I know Rachel.” Was her response too clipped? Judging from the look on the detective’s face, yes, it was.
“No love lost there?” he asked. “Well, Miss Ortiz stated flatly and for the record that Amy told her she had been seeing someone for some time but it was all over with now.”
Lily rubbed her eyes. “Detective, I apologize, I’m jetlagged and exhausted—but I just don’t see how this is relevant.”
“I will allow for your jetlag and tell you how it’s relevant. I see you’re not particularly worried about her disappearance for your own peculiar reasons. But it’s been over three weeks since Amy was last heard from or seen by anyone. It is no longer a simple mishap with dates and schedules, and little things like college graduations. This is a missing person investigation. Perhaps if we find the person she had been seeing, we’ll find out where she is.”
“I understand, detective, but I don’t know what to tell you—I just don’t know who she was seeing.”
They had been tape recording the whole conversation, though by the sharpshooter look in O’Malley’s eyes, Lily didn’t think an electromagnetic recording was necessary. She signed the missing person’s report, threw away her bloodied cotton wool, took his business card and stepped to the door. O’Malley remained sitting behind the table, his feet up on a chair.
“Still, though, doesn’t it niggle you a little bit, Miss Quinn,” said Detective O’Malley, placing his hands behind his head, “just a tiny bit, that your good friend wouldn’t tell you about her love life? I mean, why would she keep that a secret from you?”
Lily didn’t know what he was getting at, and so she didn’t reply. Did he think Amy wasn’t into boys? Did he think Amy was into her boyfriend Joshua? She didn’t want to think.
O’Malley didn’t get up, telling her to call the station or the beeper number on the card any time if she learned anything, or thought of anything. She left the room without glancing at Harkman. She would have preferred him interviewing her. She would have preferred Robespierre interviewing her.
Home wasn’t nearly far enough to walk off the gnawing sense of malaise around Lily’s nerve endings.
4 (#ulink_d12d8959-9b05-5e04-b254-f76417fa1684)
Wallets on Dressers (#ulink_d12d8959-9b05-5e04-b254-f76417fa1684)
The Noho Star on Bleeker and Lafayette was short people, so Lily came in the following day and worked the graveyard shift, thirteen hours, from eleven in the morning until midnight. Her hours, as per her request, had been increased to fifty. She hoped she could handle it.
When she got home from the precinct the night before, Lily had found Rachel, Paul, and to her greatest surprise, Joshua! camped out on her front stoop. They followed her up the stairs to her fifth floor crawl-up. By the third floor, Lily was so out of breath, she had to stop and rest. How did old Colleen do it? When she finally got inside, she collapsed on the futon.
Joshua had been calling the last two weeks, he said, because he needed to pick up his guitar case. “What happened to your hand?” he asked Lily. Unhappily she didn’t want to talk to him in the presence of all those other people.
Paul, small, slender, perfectly groomed, perfectly dressed, perfectly Italian-looking and calm as a small pond said, “Are you all right, Lil?” Then, “What happened? Where’s Ames?”
Lily opened one eye from the futon. “Is that a trick question?”
Rachel, once a kinky-black-haired Puerto Rican fourth runner up in a San Domingo teenage beauty pageant, now a Puerto Rican bleached blonde with hair thinner and straighter than Lily’s, was making retching noises in the kitchen sink after drinking three-week-old apple juice from the too-warm fridge. Lily couldn’t keep her eyes open. Suddenly there was a tree in front of her eyes, and an animal hiding behind it, and there was a whirl of red color, and patches, and small bits of dialogue, and here came that cold damp and Amy again, and Hawaii, the red flowers, and her mother saying, everything I go through I go through completely alone, and here were the sounds of Rachel swirling her mouth out with water, irritating Lily. She wanted them all to leave, especially Joshua. So she kept her eyes closed and pretended they did, and fell asleep, just in that position, on the futon, still sitting up, slightly hunched over to one side, and Amy away, her mother away, her father away, perhaps Amy was with her own father? Perhaps she went down to Florida to visit him? She must mention it to the detective—what was his name? Joshua away, Joshua, who was supposed to be the real deal, now coming for his guitar case, and when Lily woke up fourteen hours later, her body was stiff, the phone was ringing, and her knuckle was seeping blood through the bandage.
Today at work, the jetlag was getting to her. During her break, instead of eating Jell-O with whipped cream like always, she put her head down on the waitresses’ table in the booth in the back and was instantly asleep. She didn’t fall asleep, she went to sleep. When she awoke, Spencer O’Malley sat looking at her from across the table.
“Your hand is still spontaneously bleeding, I see,” he said.
She looked around groggily. His partner was not with him. “Did you come here to tell me that?” She felt disgusting.
“You called me this morning. I thought you might have remembered something important.”
“Yes. Yes.” She struggled to remember anything at all, much less why she called him nine hours ago.
“Something about Amy?”
“Something about Amy.” Lily nodded, rubbing her eyes. He pushed a glass of water toward her. She drank from it, came to a little. “Her father lives down in Islamorada, I think. Or Cape Canaveral?”
“St. Augustine perhaps?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Yes, that’s where he lives. St. Augustine.”
“Okay then. Maybe she went to visit him.”
O’Malley was quiet. “That’s what you called to tell me?”
“Yes.”
“You must think I just started this job. You’re going to have to do better than that. He was the first one we called. He hadn’t heard from her. But besides, Miss Quinn, you’re missing the point about Amy. She told her mother she would be coming home. She didn’t. She told her family she would be graduating. She didn’t. Hasn’t called, hasn’t shown up, and no one’s heard from her, not even her father in Islamorada.”
Lily struggled up. “Would you excuse me? My break is over, I think.”
“Break?” said O’Malley. “I think your shift is over.”
“Ha.” She left to wash her face. He was still sitting in her booth when she returned.
“Detective, I really must …”
But he wasn’t moving. “Just two more minutes of your time. There were a few things I forgot to mention yesterday; after all, we had so much to cover. During our search of Amy’s room, we discovered her house keys and her wallet on her dresser, leading us to suspect that she didn’t go far.”
“As I told you, that’s probably true.”
“Was she generally in the habit of leaving the apartment without her wallet or keys?”
“I guess,” said Lily. “I’m not trying to be evasive,” she added, seeing his face. She smiled wanly, but O’Malley didn’t smile, in fact, studied her extra carefully, as if she were a word on the page whose meaning he was trying to decipher. “She used to go running and didn’t like to weigh herself down. She usually took what little money she had with her. Crumpled up into a ball, or change stuffed into her pants pocket.”
“Where did she go running?”
“Central Park. The reservoir.”
“Far to go for a run all the way from the East Village.”
“Far, but worth it.”
He made a note on his pad. “What about other times? When she would disappear overnight? Did she also leave her wallet and her keys then? Running for days at a time, was she?”
“She was very fit,” Lily said, a feeble attempt at a joke. During those days too, Amy would leave her wallet. Why did Lily strongly not want to tell the detective that? “You know I didn’t always notice. I tried not to go into her room when she was gone unless I needed something. So I don’t know if she always left her wallet. I’m sure sometimes she took it.”
“Where’s her driver’s license, by the way?”
“I don’t think she had one,” Lily said hesitantly.
“Really?” With obvious surprise and a glance at her hesitation.
Lily averted her gaze, trying to think of the thing that turned her face away from him. Some vague confusion, some vague inconsistency regarding the license, but she couldn’t quite place it, hence the averted gaze. “Amy didn’t know how to drive. We live in New York. I don’t know how to drive either.”
“Interesting,” said the detective, stroking his chin. “Fascinating.” He stood to go. “Well, you’ll forgive me for not sharing in your relaxed and easygoing attitude about your best friend’s whereabouts, but I’m finding it odd, to say the least, that she’s been gone for three weeks, with her cash card, her Visa card, her Student ID, her MetroCard, and her door keys all serenely on her dresser. And she doesn’t know how to drive. So where did she go? When we searched your room, we found your MetroCard there. But we didn’t find your keys or your wallet or your ATM card. You went to Hawaii and took them with you. That seemed normal to us.”
Their eyes locked for a moment. Detective O’Malley with clear eyes that didn’t miss a thing said, “So where’s your bed?”
“Boyfriend took it.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah, well.”
Presently he slapped the table, sitting back down. “Damn! I just figured it out. I just understood why you are so cavalier about Amy.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course. You are not concerned for her, because she has been disappearing with constant regularity. She would leave her life on the dresser, vanish, and then come back, as if she’d just been for a long run. You thought nothing of it then, and you’re thinking nothing of it now.”
“Incorrect detecting, detective. I am thinking something of it now. She’s never been away for three weeks.”
“She would leave her wallet and ID and keys on her dresser, when she went out, and you never asked why?”
Lily didn’t know why she didn’t ask. “I figured when Amy was ready she’d tell me.”
There was a long pause. “Still waiting, are you, Miss Quinn?”
Lily hastily excused herself and went to finish her shift. Everybody at work had noticed that a suited-up detective flashing his badge had come looking for Lily. They asked her, they teased, they prodded, she equivocated, they pursued and pursued. Rick, the manager, watched her carefully and then called her over. “Are you in trouble of some kind?”
“No, no.”
“It’s not drugs, is it? Because …”
“It’s not drugs.”
“He’s a cuuutie,” said Judi, another waitress, pixie and not yet twenty. “Is he single?”
“I don’t know, and he’s twice your age!”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing.”
5 (#ulink_69881b43-1b2b-5257-9947-8c692368d893)
Spencer Patrick O’Malley (#ulink_69881b43-1b2b-5257-9947-8c692368d893)
Spencer came home that night and sat at his round dining table. He lived in a small apartment close to work and in a perfect location—on 11th and Broadway. From his microcosm of a kitchen and adjoining dining area windows, he saw a dozen traffic lights on Broadway, all the way down south past Astor Place. The wet, red lights burst in Technicolor in the gray rain; the grayer the rain, the brighter the reds and greens. From the entry foyer that was his library and bedroom he overlooked the courtyard of a small church. Spencer continued to live alone, certainly not for lack of trying on the parts of some of the women he had been with. What attempt has this been for you, detective, to live with another human being, his last girlfriend had asked him right before she left him. He was convinced they had not been living together; shows what he knew. Certainly he was spending a lot of time at her place, and she had been asking him to leave his things, insinuating. He was seeing a social worker now, Mary. He quite liked her—they had been together a year—but couldn’t help feeling that he was really just another one of her more complicated cases. Once she fixed him she would go. Spencer couldn’t wait for that day. He just wasn’t sure: to be fixed or for her to go?
The place belonged to his oldest brother Patrick who had been a bad boy and was kicked out by his wife, so he bought an apartment in the city, where he could be single on the weekdays and on the weekends have his kids. Soon his wife saw that living alone with the kids was not all she imagined and decided to give the wandering Patrick another chance. And so Spencer sublet Patrick’s apartment that he could barely afford on his NYC detective’s salary. But no one in New York could afford their apartments, so there was no use complaining. He complained only because he was constantly broke.
When Spencer came back to the Suffolk County Police Department after leaving his job as a senior detective at Dartmouth College up in New Hampshire, he stayed in a room above the garage in his brother Sean’s house. But then being a patrol cop on Long Island had become enough for Spencer and besides he wasn’t too crazy about Sean’s wife (she was too tidy for his liking), so he transferred to NYPD. His brother’s wife’s freakish neatness drove him to New York City, that messy kettle-pot of vice.
New York was quite different from changing tires for women on the Long Island Expressway and administering the DUI test fifteen times on a Saturday night. Spencer was first assigned as a detective third grade to the Special Investigations Division of the Detective Bureau. He was one of four local squad detectives working on the Joint Robbery Apprehension Team. He was moved across—at his own request—to Missing Persons after the MP senior detective was at the wrong place at the wrong time and was fatally shot by a perp fleeing the scene of a robbery at an all-night deli on Avenue C and 4th. Spencer thought he might be ready for missing persons again. He was made senior to the dead man’s partner, Chris Harkman, who’d been in Missing Persons for twelve years, remaining at third grade, because as Harkman said, “It’s such a low-pressure job.” He had had three heart surgeries, gout, arthritis, and was set to man the missing persons desk just two more years, long enough to retire at forty-eight with nearly full pay and full benefits.
But Spencer wasn’t ready to retire. He didn’t mind coasting and, like Harkman, would have coasted also, but it just so happened that he, by accident or fate, or by virtue of his own nitpicky character and peculiar memory, found a boy who had been missing since 1984, living years later in a crack den off Twelfth Avenue and 43rd Street. The kid was picked up by the narcs, but when Spencer saw his name on the books—which he checked daily and religiously—he recognized it. Mario Gonzalez. Spencer obsessively checked the photos and the names of every person detained by the NYPD exactly because of a case like Mario Gonzalez. Turned out the boy—who had been twelve when he had disappeared—did not want to be found by his inconsolable parents, but that wasn’t the point, for in his department Spencer was a hero. He was promoted to lieutenant first grade—and put in charge of the entire MP division—while Harkman, by virtue of being partnered with him, got a second grade promotion and a raise. That the boy killed himself a few weeks after being found didn’t dampen anyone’s joy at a, finding an MP that long gone, and b, finding an MP alive.
After that, results were expected of Spencer in a department that was notoriously low on results. It wasn’t like other departments in special investigations where the detectives were constantly getting patted on their backs for jobs well done, collars made, perps caught—in credit card and con games, larceny and extortion, airline fraud, arson and art theft—and especially homicide. If only Spencer cared a whit about the other divisions he might have been a captain already.
But Spencer’s heart, for reasons unfathomable to him, remained with finding people that had been long missing. No, not even that. Looking for people that had been long missing.
Since Gonzalez, he had found six or seven more hopeless cases and become somewhat of a mythological maverick at the department—a favorite of his chief, Colin Whittaker, and a homeboy of the homicide division next door with whom he was loosely associated. “Give it to O’Malley,” the saying around the station went. “He’ll find anything.” He became tight with a couple of guys in homicide, one particularly, Gabe McGill, whom Spencer liked so much he wished he could be partnered with him, except Spencer didn’t want homicide, and Gabe didn’t want MP.
The apartment was dark. He hadn’t turned any lights on, and that was just the way he liked it in the first few minutes after he got home from work. Work was frenetic and boisterous, and the apartment was blissfully mute; work had glaring fluorescent light contrast, and the apartment was soothingly dark. Only the changing traffic lights from Broadway flickered through the open windows. Spencer poured himself a J&B—blended with 116 different malts and 12 grains—and kept it in front of him as he palmed the glass with both hands, turning it around and around like a clock, counting the seconds, the minutes of time passing, looking at the drink, smelling it. He threw off his shoes. He took off his shirt and tie. He used the bathroom, he came back to the table. The drink was still there. Spencer was still there. He sat in the dark, facing the open windows and palmed the drink again.
He had interviewed the panicked mother, the people this Amy McFadden girl waitressed with at the Copa Cobana, her clique of friends, all confounded but eager to help. He searched the apartment, he checked her bank records, her credit card accounts, the Department of Motor Vehicles.
And then he met Lily.
The girl seemed so self-possessed, so unconcerned—and so tanned. No histrionics, no whining from this girl; he liked that. Unlike the other one, Rachel Ortiz. She was an emoter. But Lily had herself and the matter in hand. Unlike the mother, Lily was not unduly anxious. She should talk to Amy’s mother, calm her down. Perhaps Lily was right. Perhaps her missing roommate would just show up.
Lily was smooth and chocolate bronzed and young, her little spaghetti strap tank top, her short, short denim skirt. Fleetingly he imagined her lying on the white sand in Maui, all moist and hot from the sun, eyes closed, on her back, browning, burning, topless.
Spencer needed to pour the drink back into the bottle. He never drank on the days he worked, because Spencer knew that his mind played tricks on him when it told him he could do it, could have just one, when it intellectualized and rationalized the glass in his hands. He imagined bringing the whisky to his mouth and downing it in three deep swallows. No dainty swilling, smelling, sipping of the blended malt for him in a quaint dram.
If life had taught Spencer Patrick O’Malley anything it was that the missing never just showed up, and there was no such thing as having just one.
6 (#ulink_2e325b97-98bd-548a-9562-8db1d7c3ae96)
Conversations with Mothers (#ulink_2e325b97-98bd-548a-9562-8db1d7c3ae96)
“Detective O’Malley …” Lily wished she could ask him to stop, tell him to stop coming to the diner. He’d been to see her five times in ten days. “People are starting to talk,” was all she said.
“Really? What are they saying?”
Lily shook her head. “What can I do for you today? Can I get you a cup of coffee? A donut?”
“Very stereotypical of you, Miss Quinn. No, thank you to both. I am not a donut person. Have you spoken to Amy’s mother?”
“No, not yet.”
“You should call her. She would like to hear from you. I think it will be good for her to hear from you. She’s always just this side of hysteria. She calls me four times a day. And I’ve got no leads besides you.”
“I’m not a lead,” said Lily, taken aback, but then saw he was half-joking. “Detective,” she said, almost pleadingly. “I’ll call her, and I’m going to tell her what I’ve told you. I think she’s worried for nothing. I think Amy just left for a while and will soon turn up safely and everything will be all right. My hunch is that Amy went with whoever she was seeing on vacation.”
“Oh, so a minute ago you didn’t think she was seeing anyone at all, and now you think she’s eloped?”
Lily squeezed her hands together. She could not do this anymore, she had to go back to work, she had other customers!
During her silence, Spencer said, “And do you think Amy would leave on vacation for four weeks without telling anyone and miss her graduation, to which she invited her whole family? Is she that unthinking, that inconsiderate? Wouldn’t she realize her parents would be worried sick about her?”
“Not unthinking, not inconsiderate, just in love, detective. You know? We forgive people who are in love for their short-term inconsideration. It’s such bad form to deny them.”
“So a minute ago, no boyfriend whatsoever and now so wildly in love, you’re defending her on grounds of temporary insanity? Please, pick a side of the fence, Miss Quinn, and keep to it.” He tipped his proverbial hat as he left.
Judi came over and whispered, “Ooooooh,” from behind.
“Just stop it,” said Lily.
Why wasn’t she able to call Amy’s mother? Why couldn’t she make that call? On the surface it seemed so easy, as easy as talking to the detective. Easier—she knew her, she liked her. Hi, Mrs. McFadden, how are you, and the other children … ugh, right there. The other children? Yes, Mrs. McFadden, I know it’s terrible about Amy. She’s gone and no one knows where she is, but the other children that you still have, how are they? Are they safe? That was the whole problem. Imagining the conversation filled Lily with such itching discomfort that she just couldn’t bring herself to pick up the phone.
She called her grandmother instead.
“Have you been reading the papers?” said Claudia. “An Amtrak train struck a log truck at a crossing this morning, derailing all ten cars and injuring ten people. Two people were seriously hurt.”
“Grandma …”
“A microphone stand impaled a pregnant mother, who fell in her own house while getting her two boys ready for school. She fell from the second floor to the first and was impaled through the chest on her microphone stand. She was a musician.”
“Grandma, please!”
“Think about those boys. It’s terrible seeing your own mother get hurt in such a freak accident.”
“Yes. Yes, it must be. Well, thanks for talking. I gotta run.”
Andrew hadn’t called Lily since she got back. She had called him at home last week, but Miera said he was in Washington. “Lily, his schedule is posted online. Clearly says, Washington. Call him there.”
She called him there, but he was still in session. And he didn’t return her call. Typical of him. He would get so busy, sometimes she didn’t hear from him for weeks. She called Andrew’s apartment to speak to her father, but there was no answer. She walked around her bare room, looked at her watercolors, her photographs, her words, pictures of herself as a child, held by her sister Amanda, hugged by her brother—their youngest, Lilianne, good girl, dark girl, smart girl, walking early, smiling early, clever, funny, holding up a picture of a perfect lotus flower she drew when she was three, laughing at her mother, who took the photo. Suddenly Lily stopped walking, her gaze darkened, her eyes blinked, blinked again, closed.
Spencer who saw everything. Could he have looked at her walls and missed the lottery ticket? It was small and tucked in, part of a collage, covered by a photo on one side, and old American Ballet Company tickets on the other, but could he have seen? She came closer to the ticket. Oh, so what if he did? He didn’t know by heart the drawing from that day, April 18, 1999.
When the phone rang, she absent-mindedly picked it up.
“Lil?” It was her mother! That caught Lily unawares. Had she been caught awares, she never would have picked up the phone. The modern conveniences of caller ID—call screening. Maybe if she cashed in her lottery ticket, she could afford the six extra bucks for caller ID-while-call-waiting; that would be most useful. Ha! This she was thinking while trying to decipher the tone of her mother’s voice which seemed rather chipper for a woman who had found herself recently and unexpectedly without a husband.
Suddenly her father picked up the other extension. “Lil?”
“Papi?”
“Yes, why so shocked? I do live here, you know.” And he laughed.
Her mother said, “I barely spoke five seconds to my own child. Could I have her first, and then you’ll have her when I’m done?”
“Mom, let me speak to Papi quick now.”
As soon as Allison slammed down the phone, George said, “Yes, honey?” in his most casual, most unconcerned, most I’m-in-Hawaii-and-I’m-so-happy voice.
“I don’t understand. I thought you were staying with Andrew?”
“Oh, I was in D.C. on a little business. That’s all. Not a big deal.”
“So you’re … back?”
“Everything is fine, great even. I was getting the jitters, you know, having worked non stop for forty-five years. Well, you wouldn’t know. But someday you’ll work.”
“I work now. Fifty hours a week. Papi, what’s going on? Talk to me.”
“Nothing to talk about. Do you know your mother has been coming to the beach with me every single morning? She loves it. She wasn’t feeling well when you were here. She is much better now. And she is cutting down on her smoking. She is looking beautiful, by the way, your mother.”
Allison came back on the line, and both she and George were on the phone now, clucking, joking, chuckling. “Lily, this is like a second honeymoon with your father,” her mother whispered. “I can’t tell you how happy we are.”
Could Lily hang up fast enough? She didn’t think so.
Now she had the strength to call Amy’s mother!
The voice on the other line was groggy and slightly slurred.
“Oh, Lily,” said Mrs. McFadden. “Where is she? Where is Amy? Why haven’t we heard from her?”
Lily wanted to say a few hollow words, and did, petering off, trailing off, she wanted to say more, about how she wasn’t worried—which was less and less true—and about how Amy liked to be independent and she hated accounting to anyone for her actions. (“That’s so true,” said Amy’s mother.) She said that she would call as soon as Amy came back, but she said it feebly, and it didn’t matter anyway, it wasn’t heard over Mrs. McFadden’s crying. There was no getting through to the mother, just as Lily had suspected, and she didn’t have anything in her arsenal with which to get through. Maybe Amanda would know how. After all, she had four children. Maybe if one of them went missing she would know what to say to Mrs. McFadden, who had had Amy with her first husband and was now remarried with two brand new children. She must have thought she was so close to not having to worry about Amy anymore.
Jan continued to cry, and Lily continued to sit on the phone and not know what to say except an intermittent and impotent, “I’m really sorry.”
Paul and Rachel, who were Amy’s friends and whose nucleus was Amy, wanted to talk only about—Amy. The conversation with Paul inevitably went something like this:
“Lil, where do you think she is?”
“I don’t know. What about you?”
“Have no idea. But then I didn’t live with her, I don’t know her everyday habits.”
“Paul, I might know how many times a day Amy brushes her teeth but I don’t know where she’s gone to.”
“I understand. No one is blaming you, Lil. Why so defensive?”
“Because everybody seems to think I have answers that I just don’t have. You don’t know how often that detective asks me where she is.”
“Where do you think she is?”
“I don’t know!”
“Do you think something happened to her?”
“No! Like what?”
And with Rachel:
“God, Lil, what do you think happened to Amy?”
“I don’t know. What about you?”
“I have no idea. But then, I didn’t live with her.”
Lily formulated her doubts. “Rach, the detective told me you told him that Amy was definitely seeing somebody.”
“That’s what she told me. Don’t you know? I thought you’d confirm for sure. Who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“She didn’t tell me, Rachel.”
“Why would she keep something like that from you? I thought you were close.”
“We were close. We are close.”
“By the way … is the detective married?”
“I don’t know. Why would I know that? And what do you care? How is TO-nee?”
“Tony is great,” Rachel said cryptically. “Never better.”
“So what are you asking about the detective for then?”
“No reason.”
Lily fell back on Amy’s bed. Did she have the answers? Should she have the answers? That was even worse. Should she and just doesn’t because Lily Quinn doesn’t have the answers to anything? Not to why she hasn’t graduated in six years, not to what she wants to do with her life, not to what’s wrong with her mother, not to just what it is that Joshua can’t love about her, not to where Amy is. Not to 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
MISSING: Amy McFadden
DESCRIPTION:
Sex: Female
Race: Caucasian
Age: 24
Height: 5'8"
Weight: 140 lbs.
Build: Medium
Complexion: Fair
Hair: Red, long, curly
Eyes: Brown
Clothing/Jewelry: Unknown.
Last seen: May, 1999, in the vicinity of Avenue C and 9th Street in Manhattan, New York, within the confines of the 9th Precinct.
Lily and Rachel and Paul walked around the neighborhood and tacked the 8½ by 11 posters with Amy’s photo on the lamp posts of every block from 12th Street down to 4th and on three avenues, A, B, and C. Lily couldn’t help but be reminded of thumbtacking her lottery ticket to her wall, and every time she thought of it she felt stabbed a little in the chest, and walked on to the next lamp post without raising her head, careful not to look at her friends, nor at the homeless on the stoops who gazed at them from underneath their rags. Paul tied shiny yellow ribbons above the posters. Amy missing. 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1. Amy missing. 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
7 (#ulink_8215354d-9ca7-5880-aa11-ca0392c9df99)
Birds of Paradise (#ulink_8215354d-9ca7-5880-aa11-ca0392c9df99)
Allison showed up for their new conjugal bliss of a honeymoon three days straight. She went to the beach with him gladly the first day, reluctantly the second day, and on the third morning with hostility, complaining about the wetness of the water, and the sandiness of the sand, and the sunniness of the sun, and the steepness of the hill, complaining about his shoes, which as far as he could see weren’t bothering her. Complaining about the omelet he had yet to make (“I’m sick of your omelets.”) and the coffee (“You never make enough.”).
The fourth morning she didn’t get out of bed, telling him in a mumbled voice that she had had a late night and needed to sleep. The fifth morning, she said she wasn’t feeling well. Her legs hurt from all the walking. She was developing corns and calluses on her feet. She was getting a chill from the cold (??? 79ºF!) water so early in the morning. Her bathing suit was dirty and needed to be washed. The towels weren’t dry and she wasn’t going without the towels.
“Allie, want to go to the beach?”
“No. How many beaches can we go to? I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen a volcanic beach?”
She paused. “Sand and water, right?”
“No, volcanic pebbles.”
“You want me to walk barefoot on rocks? Don’t you remember how I cut my foot?”
“Allie, let’s go, for an hour.”
“I’m not going. I have to put the towels in the dryer, they’ll smell if I don’t. Why don’t you go?”
“I don’t want to go by myself.”
“Well, I’m not going.”
George went by himself.
How about Hamoa Beach with gray sand and 4000-foot-high cliffs hanging over the ocean?
“Gray sand? I’m supposed to be tempted by that?”
George went by himself.
Big Beach, Wailea Beach, Black Sand Beach?
“Big Beach, just bigger than ours? And black sand? That’s attractive. Now white sand beach on the Gulf of Mexico, that’s attractive, that’s nice. It doesn’t get hot, and it’s so fine, it’s like flour. Why didn’t we get a condo in Florida?”
“Because you said there were too many storms and it was too hot and humid.”
“I never said that, never. It would have been a beautiful life.”
George went by himself.
Lahaina, the Road to Hana, the rainforest?
“You want me to go see trees, George? Walk along the road and into the trees? Poland had forests. And roads. Is it going to rain in the rainforest? I don’t think so.”
George went by himself. Allison came with him to Lahaina once because there was shopping in Lahaina.
“Maui, the god of sun, the cursed god of sun. He cursed this place with perpetual long days of sunshine,” said Allison.
George tried a different tactic.
“What about if we go to the mainland, Allie? Let’s fly to San Francisco, and we’ll drive down south to Las Vegas. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Something hot, yes. Do you have any idea what the temperature is in Las Vegas in July? It’s a hundred and twenty degrees. And what are we going to do, rent a car? We can’t afford such an expense. You’re retired now, George.”
He suggested bringing their own car on a ship to San Francisco.
“What, our car, with no AC, in July? We’ll suffocate before we leave California. Look, get it out of your head. I’m not going to the mainland in the summer. You know I don’t feel well, I can’t be traveling in such heat with all my problems. It’ll set me back ten years.”
He suggested making plans to go in the fall when the weather became cooler. He was playing on her love of the slots. On her love of getting dressed up and like a proper civilized person giving her money away willingly and happily to a small steel machine.
Viva! Las Vegas.
But she couldn’t face the thought of traveling anywhere with George, of spending every waking moment with him and sleeping moment, too, for they could hardly get two hotel rooms, could they? The thought of not having a room of her own to retire to where she could close the door, and when no one would see her, was too difficult even as a thought to Allison. She couldn’t imagine it, how could she ever live it?
“Would you stop pestering me already! What’s this compulsion with always going, going, going? Why can’t you sit still for a moment? And if you wanted your beloved continent so much, why did we buy a condo in Maui, then, huh? Why did you push me to buy one here?”
George reminded her she was the one who had wanted to live in Maui.
“Oh, that’s right, blame it all on me. Well, fine, we’re here, and I’m paying plenty for this condo, I’m not leaving it for three months to go somewhere else. What an idiotic waste of money. You always were a spendthrift. That’s why you don’t have any money now.”
Slowly, very slowly, he suggested selling the condo and moving back east. To North Carolina, perhaps, where there was fishing and gardening, and seasons, and lakes—where his brother lived.
“We just got here and you want to move already? You’re sick, that’s what you are. You need professional help, why can’t you be happy anywhere, why? It’s beautiful here, what the hell is wrong with you? You have too much time on your hands, that’s your problem.”
And then she started falling down.
After the first time she fell, he asked her about it, and she said, “Cough syrup. Haven’t you been paying any attention to what’s going on with me? I’m very sick.” She coughed for emphasis.
“Maybe if you left the apartment once for five minutes in a whole month, you’d feel better.”
“Oh, that’s great! Go ahead, scream at a sick woman!”
The next morning when George came back from his constitutional walk and swim at eight-thirty, she had fallen again in the sunken living room.
“It’s my osteoporosis,” she said later. “My knees buckle. They don’t bend anymore like they used to.”
He found her on the floor clutching the mail in her hands.
“The cough syrup,” Allison told him. “Mixed with antidepressants. The doctor said it’s a very dangerous combination. I could die.”
“Then why do you take them in a combination?”
“Oh, I suppose that’s what you want, your depressed wife to cough herself to death!”
In the mornings she was always in a terrible mood, and in the afternoons George didn’t see her because she was sleeping. He hated cooking only for himself, hated eating alone. But what could he do? He would have tuna sashimi, with some soy sauce and wasabi. He had never had tuna of the kind he bought in Maui, or pineapples. He ate them in the afternoon, while he planned his dinner menu, read cookbooks, went on the computer, emailed his friends, called one of his children and sat on the patio, smoking and waiting for his wife to awaken. The sun was bright, the wind high, the trees sparkling green, and twice a week the rolling lawns in the condo units were mowed and the air smelled so green and fresh and cut-grassy as he ate his dripping mangoes.
Allison got up hours before George, despite the black blankets she hung on her windows to keep the light out. As soon as the Hawaiian sun shot an arrow of light over the horizon at five, Allison was up. She didn’t want to be up. She wished she could sleep soundly through till midday. When the children were small, isn’t that what she had dreamed about? Isn’t that what her oldest daughter dreams about now, with four little ones of her own? To sleep and not be awakened? Why won’t Allison’s body sleep past the squinting sunrise?
It’s that Hawaiian sunrise.
At night she stayed up until two or three in the morning, watching old movies, infomercials, the psychic network, the shopping channel, and had big plans for herself for the next day. Big plans. She would get up, and go for that cursed beach walk with him, and she would clean and do laundry and then maybe they would go out for the afternoon, go for a drive, into the fucking rainforest, into the fucking volcano. To Lahaina maybe where she could do a little shopping, a little window browsing. They would find a restaurant right on the ocean and have dinner while watching the sunset. Oh, and she would read. She had the time. Her older daughters kept sending her novels to read. Her small condo was overwhelmed with their packages. It’s not that she didn’t try to read. She did. She just couldn’t read a single sentence through to the end. Not one. Her mind would start wandering, she would lose track of her thoughts, she would start examining her hands, dotted with age, darkened with the years. Her nails, thinking about polish, red or clear? She would—
Nothing held her interest, not a single word in anybody else’s life. Don’t they know what’s happening to me, she wanted to cry. I’m old. My skin is sagging, and the corners of my eyes have turned down. I’m bloated and I’ve got skin where I shouldn’t have any.
The look of love is in your eyes …
Sometimes music played from the past in the quiet condo.
I want to be young again, she cried, standing by the window. I want to be young and to swim in the sea, and fall in love, I want to be beautiful and watch him fall in love with me.
She told this to George and he flung out his hand and said, “Swim in the sea every fucking morning, Allison.”
“You don’t understand anything,” she said. “I said swim in the sea young.”
She wasn’t growing old gracefully.
The day was so long, there was so much of it, and there was nothing she wanted to do, there was nothing she needed to do. Was Hawaii beautiful? Yes, so what. Peaceful? Still so what. She constantly wished for rain. Rain! Sky be cloudy! Be gray.
Every day was like every other. The morning was crisp, in the afternoon there were winds, and the evening was all gold hues and still waters. Come another day and another and another. After living in seasonal New York so many years, after coming from damp northern Poland as a little girl, Allison had said all her life that what she wanted was somewhere warm to rest her weary bones. They came to Maui when they heard it was paradise. And here it was.
Allison had never been more miserable.
She cleaned the condo, but that took all of an hour. She showered. She made her bed. She made coffee. She smoked. She pretended to read the paper, she pretended to read books, she thumbed through catalogs, she indifferently watched TV. She didn’t know how to make her life right. If only she hadn’t had all those children. They sapped, sucked what young life she had had and weren’t any comfort to her in her old age either. She never heard from them. Even from youngest to whom she still sent money. Allison didn’t hear from Lily the most. The ungrateful youngest child. The noose around the neck of Allison’s thwarted ambitions.
But it wasn’t the nonexistent career she lamented the most. It wasn’t the children. It wasn’t the husband. It was the loss of youth, the loss of youthful beauty, the loss of skin tone and smoothness, the pert freshness of her young legs, her arms, her flat stomach; it was the vertical lines, the horizontal lines, it was the neck that no amount of Creme de la Mer could fix. Youth. In the war against Time, her minuscule armies were being defeated, and it wasn’t an even fight. Time knew she wasn’t a mythical creature that sloughed off its old skin as it went into the sea and came out fresh to her daughters and granddaughters as the young girl inside the old woman. This was no time for myths. The whole day time toyed with Allison, laughed at her.
And at five in the morning when she woke up with the sun peeking promise through her room darkening blankets, time mocked her the most.
8 (#ulink_95672546-ac62-5904-afa4-69f3e99c836f)
The Disadvantages of Walking to Work (#ulink_95672546-ac62-5904-afa4-69f3e99c836f)
Spencer was outside Lily’s door. It was the end of June. She was wearing her work uniform—black pants and white shirt. Her short hair was slicked back and still wet.
“Detective … if Amy comes back, don’t you think you’ll be the first one I’ll call?”
“I don’t know, will I be?”
“Isn’t there some other vice in this city besides missing persons? Isn’t anyone committing crimes out there? I know the mayor’s ‘Clean Up New York’ program has been a considerable success, but there must be something else for you to do.” They turned the corner and continued walking down Avenue C.
“There isn’t.” He looked dispirited. “These missing person cases …”
“Is this a standard case, then?” Lily wished she hadn’t said that. It sounded so flip. What if he said yes? Yes, this is just one of our regular, run-of-the-mill, nothing-special-about-it cases. In one month it won’t be a case anymore. It will be a statistic. Lily shivered in the heat. Why did she ask?
But Spencer to his credit said, “Amy is not a standard case.” And when Lily was afraid to look at him, lest she see the lying in his eyes and he see the skepticism in hers, he repeated, “Really. She is not. Missing person cases are in many cases misunderstandings. Someone moves away and doesn’t leave a forwarding address. Or someone goes for that planned two week trip to Europe and decides to stay for three months. Or the teenager runs away with her boyfriend whom her mother forbids her to see. The family hires a private eye, and with luck finds them in two weeks.”
“There’s no private eye for Amy.” Lily said that wistfully.
“Oh, but there is.”
She stopped walking and looked at him in surprise.
“Jan McFadden is paying for him. Lenny, the muckwader, sacked after twenty years on the force. We sacked him, now suddenly he’s indispensable.”
“Is he a gumshoe, Detective O’Malley?” Gumshoe was such a funny word.
“Gumshoe is one way to describe him. He is an unhealthy version of my partner, with less fashion sense. Lenny hasn’t turned up anything. And that’s saying something because Lenny trudges up dirt we don’t even ask for.” Spencer paused. “Lenny is … shall we say, a bottom dweller.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good then. Amy is obviously not at the bottom.”
“Who knows? She’s made herself impossible to trace. But don’t you see, in the discarded identification is everything. She didn’t leave her identity behind every time she went out. You said so yourself. Sometimes she left it, you said. When Amy left the apartment without ID, it meant one of two things: either she was trying to protect herself, or she was trying to protect whoever she was with.”
Lily was quiet. “She wasn’t that calculating. Maybe she’s working somewhere. What about a check of some kind, Social Security maybe?
“Last Social Security entry dates back to the second week in May, when the tax was taken out of her paycheck at the Copa Cobana.”
He had already been so thorough. “Anything else to check?”
Without looking at her, Spencer said, “In New York State there have been no reports of deceased unidentified young women either in hospitals, morgues or funeral parlors. There have been no reports of unidentified young women found in crashed cars, train wrecks or public parks. And believe me, we have men combing through every bush around the Central Park reservoir. It should only take us another three or four years to search every acre.”
She was storming for other ideas, trying to be helpful, walking briskly. Lafayette Street never seemed so far away. He walked alongside her. “Maybe,” said Lily, her voice weakening with the slowing of her heart, “Amy doesn’t want to be found.”
“Maybe,” said Spencer, “Amy wants to be found but can’t be.”
9 (#ulink_d0ed0049-a31d-5ed4-871b-af05300dd69e)
Ignorance in Amy’s Bed (#ulink_d0ed0049-a31d-5ed4-871b-af05300dd69e)
Lily was awake at three in the morning. She was lying in Amy’s bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Amy, trying to trick her mind into not thinking about Amy. There was something bothering Lily terribly. She kicked off the covers, she spread her arms and legs, pretending to fly. Her limbs felt a peculiar aching, and her heart wasn’t letting go of the needles. A water faucet dripped in the bathroom; Lily could hear it clearly through the open door. She wanted to get up and close the door but couldn’t.
Something was wrong inside her. Her weakness, her sadness, her exhaustion. Maybe Spencer was right, maybe she should go talk to somebody. But who?
Lily could not go to sleep. An inner beast was gnashing its teeth on her spleen, sucking out her bone marrow—Oh God!
Suddenly she jumped up off the bed. Where did she get the energy to do that? She was so tired. But she jumped out of bed and stood for a moment, panting, looking down at Amy’s quilt, Amy’s pillows, Amy’s sheets.
She went into the bathroom and then into the kitchen to get some water. Afterward she sat cross-legged on the floor in her own empty bedroom and dialed 1-800-m-a-t-t-r-e-s, leaving the last S off for savings. In fifteen minutes, at four in the morning, she bought herself a full-size mattress with a frame, all for five hundred bucks—her last week’s earnings—and it was going to be delivered just hours later at eleven. What a country.
After she hung up with the bed people, Lily lay on the futon in the living room/hallway and turned on the miserable middle-of-the-night TV, channel-surfed for a few nightmarish minutes—cream on your face, psychic on the 900 line, lose weight fast with our successful formula—then picked up the phone again and called the precinct. The night-time officer asked if it was an emergency, and she didn’t think it was, but she couldn’t be sure.
“Detective O’Malley is not on call tonight, miss. I can tell him in the morning when he comes in that you called. Are you in trouble?”
Lily thought she was. But to the officer she said no and, hanging up, lay on the futon, turning the sound off on the TV and staring at the flickering screen. She thought of calling the beeper number on his business card, but didn’t. Words from an almost forgotten Springsteen song kept going round in her head. Hey man, did you see that?/His body hit the street with such a beautiful thud/I wonder what the dude was sayin’/or was he just lost in the flood?
She played around with the remote and adjusted the colors to black and white. Now she was watching the Psychic Network in black and white and as she stared into the TV all Lily kept thinking about was the weeks and weeks she had spent sleeping in Amy’s bed without ever bothering to get her own, as if she knew in her deepest, blackest heart that Amy was not coming back.
They had plans to get jobs together. They were both artists, they both painted. Lily liked to paint people, she had a facility with faces and bodies. Amy liked to paint still life—chairs, pots, trees. They sketched together in Washington Square Park and in Union Square Park, and in Battery Park, and even in the homeless-addled, heroin-addled Tompkins Square Park. They sketched the nightlines of Broadway and Fifth Avenue and later painted in the colors. But in many sketches, particularly of late, Lily had been noticing that while she continued to add color where color was needed, Amy left her own work black and white, gray, tonal, uncolored. There were no yellows of street lights, no reds of traffic signs, no blues of police cars. Amy’s night-time Statue of Liberty, night-time World Trade Center, night-time Empire State Building remained dark and colorless. One sketch was all black tones, and when Lily asked what that was, Amy replied that it was Times Square from Broadway at midnight. Where are the billboards, Lily asked. They’re always lit. It’s foggy, said Amy, sounding so empty. It’s a blackout. Can’t see them. Why was Lily remembering all that now?
She slept on the futon and remembered Amy, and when she woke up, Amy was so vivid as if she were still in bed sleeping.
And Lily cried.
The mattress came, the iron frame. She tipped the two Hispanic delivery guys twenty bucks for being young and flirty with her, showered, got dressed and went to work a double. After making one-hundred-and-seventy dollars, she took a cab back home. She paid ten bucks to take a cab home from work every night now, the days of no cabs long behind her. One evening it had occurred to her that if only she cashed in her 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1, she could have a limo and a driver waiting for her every night when she finished her shift as a diner waitress. Lily had laughed and walked home that night.
Tonight Spencer was waiting for her on the front stoop. “How long is that shift, anyway?” he said, closing his police notebook.
She couldn’t help a small smile. “Detective O’Malley, it’s nine thirty at night. Don’t you ever not work?”
“Not when I have a mother who calls me every day wanting to know if I’ve found her child,” said Spencer.
Lily stopped smiling and was silent. Silent or defeated. She made to move around him but he took her arm. “Why did you call me in the middle of the night, Lilianne?”
“I—” she stammered.
“Did you have something to tell me?”
“I just—I got worried about something.”
“About what?”
“I don’t remember now.”
They sat down on the stoop. It was a New York night in July, still dusky out, still hot out.
“I’m not Miss Quinn anymore?”
“When Miss Quinn calls me in the middle of the night she automatically becomes a Lilianne. City regulation 517.”
When does Lilianne become a Lily? she wanted to ask but didn’t. It sounded too flirty.
Spencer said, “The Odessa Café on Avenue A and 7th has very good stuffed cabbages, and I’m starved. Can I work and eat?”
“Will eating count as working?”
“Of course. Dining with witnesses. It’s called canvassing. Come. While you eat, you can try to remember what you were thinking about at four in the morning. But you know, don’t you, that if you’re calling me at that time of night, I’m going to think Amy has come back.”
“Unfortunately, no.” Lily struggled up from the stoop and saw he struggled with resisting helping her. She wanted to ask if she could call him Spencer. Seemed odd to be so formal. “You must see quite a bit on these mean streets, no?”
“Yes, especially in your neighborhood.”
“Did you say you drove a patrol car on the LIE before coming to New York?”
“Yes.”
“You went from being a traffic cop on the expressway to manning a special division?”
“Before that I was for years a senior detective up in Dartmouth College.”
Lily perked up. “That must have been some great job! I actually took a tour of Dartmouth in my senior year in high school. It sure looked like an awesome place to go to school.”
“Hmm,” he said. “I didn’t go to school there. I wouldn’t know.”
“But what kind of investigative experience was that for you? Arresting frat boys on Saturday nights for underage drinking?”
“If only,” said Spencer.
Lily glanced at him with curiosity. “More?”
“A little more.”
Was he clamming up? “Detective … does Ivy League Dartmouth have a steamy underside?”
“I don’t know if steamy is the right word. Maybe wicked.”
“Oh, do please tell. I love wicked stories.”
“Another time. Though I do like your faith in the things you believe to be true. It’s very youthful.” He smiled. “I’m slightly less youthful.”
At the diner after they sat and ordered, Lily said, “I remember what I wanted to tell you.”
“Is it something about Amy?”
“Yes. She took two years off between high school and college. Right after high school she went traveling cross country with some friends of hers from Port Jeff. Eventually I think she got tired of the whole thing and came home.”
Spencer became interested in Amy’s sabbatical. He asked about the people she traveled with. Lily told him what she knew which admittedly wasn’t much. Paul might know more, having gone to the same high school.
“What happened to them all? Did they come back to Long Island, like Amy?”
Lily wasn’t sure. The only thing she thought she knew for sure was that one committed suicide, one OD’d, one was killed in a drunk driving accident, smashing their traveling van, and two were still at large. But she wasn’t sure.
Spencer stopped eating his stuffed cabbage.
Lily coughed. “Amy was evasive when she talked about this period in her life. She told me some anecdotes, of Kansas, of New Orleans, but she barely volunteered information other than to tell me a little about her friends, and to caution me against using drugs.” Lily looked into her cold cabbage. “She was like you with Dartmouth. Cagey.”
Spencer tapped on the table to get her attention. “You better hope she wasn’t like me at Dartmouth. But are you telling me that of the six people that went in one beat up van—three of them are dead?”
“If you put it like that.”
“How would you put it?”
“Just life, detective. Car accidents, drugs, suicides. What else kills the young these days?” Lottery tickets?
Spencer quietly studied Lily. “Aren’t you wise. I’ll tell you what else kills young people. Unlawful killing. Homicide. Manslaughter. Killing with depraved indifference to human life. Murder. But two more people missing? Paul must know these kids. They all went to the same high school. Tomorrow you and I will go talk to him.”
“Spencer—I mean Detective O’Malley …” Lily turned red. He smiled. “I don’t know if Paul knows anything. But these kids aren’t the important thing.”
“You don’t think so? Six people in one car meeting with extreme fate? Not important?”
Lily wondered if their birthdays or significant digits were 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1. But why would she wonder that? What did her six numbers have to do with six people she did not know?
She knew Amy. Amy was 24.
Lily was 24, too.
This was a stupid line of thinking. Lily wished Spencer hadn’t led her to it with his talk of fate.
When he went to pay and took his cash out, a stash of lottery tickets fell out of his wallet. She laughed. “Aren’t you an optimist. Are you collecting them?”
“Yes, when I get to twelve, I check them all at once. But what, you just collect the one on your wall?”
Her heart skipped a beat, another. “So is there anything at all that you don’t notice, Detective O’Malley?”
“Obviously, Miss Quinn, or I wouldn’t still be looking for your roommate.”
They met the next afternoon in the downstairs reception area of the precinct to go see Paul at the salon. Spencer had on a suit jacket in which he looked boiling hot, while Lily had practically no clothes on at all, and still had glistening arms and legs and neck. New York City in July. Hot.
“A little warm in that jacket, detective?”
“I am, yes. But who’s going to take me seriously if I wear skimpy shorts and a tank top, Miss Quinn?”
Lily squinted. Another tease from Spencer? She didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he noticed her summer outfit. He didn’t seem to be the kind that noticed that sort of thing. He noticed everything, as an officer of the law, but not that sort of thing. Yet he said skimpy shorts. When she walked in front of him to cross the street she wondered if he was watching her.
“Your partner doesn’t come with you?”
“On little errands like this? Nah. You’ve seen Detective Harkman. He likes to save himself for the big trips. Most of the day, he’s just a housemouse.”
Lily laughed at the terminology.
At the salon, Paul declared that he knew “nothing about nothin’.” That period of Amy’s life, he told Spencer, was a two-year hole from which Amy emerged intact, as if the two years had never existed. She graduated high school, she disappeared, she went to find her wild and new self, she came back, her wild and new self found, and re-entered life. She enrolled at Hunter, became a waitress at a cocktail bar, transferred to City College where she met Lily, re-established her friendships, and did not talk about the two years on the road.
“I’m not asking about the two years on the road. I’m asking about the people Amy traveled with.”
Paul didn’t know them.
“You and she weren’t friendly in high school?”
“Best friendly.”
Spencer waited.
“We lived on the same block but we didn’t hang out with the same people, all right. She hung out with some real losers, and I didn’t. They weren’t musicians, they weren’t jocks, or nerds, or in choir. I don’t know who they were. I don’t know them, don’t know their names, don’t know what happened to them. Like I said, we didn’t travel in the same circles back then.”
“I see. Could you point them out in your high school yearbook?”
“God! I don’t see what it matters. It was six years ago. What does high school matter now?”
“Could you point them out in your high school yearbook?” repeated Spencer.
“No, I don’t think I could.”
“Did they belong to a club?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Were they political maybe?”
“Maybe. I don’t know about them. Political! They were just a bunch of going-nowhere potheads.”
“Amy too?”
“No, not her! She just got mixed up with the wrong people, all right?”
“Well,” said Spencer, “it would be all right, if Amy weren’t missing for two months, but since she is, it’s not all right, no. Your friend here seems to think it was something stronger than pot.”
Paul shot Lily a withering look, standing clutching his colorist’s chair. “Does Harlequin know this for sure?”
“Harlequin knows nothing for sure,” said Lily.
“Exactly,” said Paul.
Spencer led her away, his hand momentarily pressing her between her bare shoulder-blades.
Talking to Spencer about Amy was getting to be bad for Lily’s ego. It was like being with Joshua. It was occurring to Lily with startling alarm how many things she ought to have known that she didn’t know.
Did Amy live a life that was more troubled and troublesome than Amy let on, coming from white, middle-class, peaceful Port Jefferson? Did Amy have secrets she kept so well? Or was Lily less interested than she realized? She didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
How long had Lily not been able to speak normally to her mother? When did her mother so thoroughly and completely check out of Lily’s life? Lily didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Ten years ago after that blasted emergency ulcer surgery? Nine years ago in Forest Hills when she fell out of a chair (!) in the apartment and broke her arm, and her father said, “Mommy is fine, she’s fine, don’t worry, she just fell.”? Lily thought it was an aberration, a Polish accident, it was so long ago. But there had hardly been a mother since then. What had her mother been doing for nine years?
One more layer of bottomless ignorance.
10 (#ulink_62563610-fe6d-57dd-8385-24b494e2ac6f)
Things in the Closet (#ulink_62563610-fe6d-57dd-8385-24b494e2ac6f)
It was five in the morning, the sun was barely up, while Allison, who was up, was up seething.
She never called, never, Allison thought, as she meandered from her room to the kitchen, wondering if she wanted something to eat. She didn’t even call when Allison sent her half her rent plus a little extra. Since Amy went missing, the entire $1500 has been on Lily’s shoulders, and Allison wanted to help her daughter, who didn’t even call to say thank you! Not even a thank you for sending nine-hundred dollars, as if the money were a given, a birthright.
Typical of her. Lily always took everything for granted, as if it all were just handed down on a large platter for the youngest child. Allison heard George snoring behind the louver doors of his small room. Hear that? He sleeps as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. Nothing fazes him. Not my ill health, not my depression, not my unhappiness, nothing. He doesn’t need me either.
She glanced at her bills, in a pile on the desk, at the unopened packages from Amanda and Anne. They kept sending those damn books. You’d think they’d call once instead.
Nobody calls.
Oh, Andrew calls every week, to say the quickest hello to her and to then to speak for half an hour to his father. Andrew, who’s got no time for anyone, speaks to George for half an hour every week! They pretend they’re talking politics, hockey, but what they’re really doing is ignoring her. And even Andrew has been calling less and less lately.
She went into her bathroom, and examined her face in the mirror. It was bloated and swollen. She examined her graying teeth (because of all the smoking and coffee) and her yellowing skin. She looked for the cranberry juice. She wasn’t feeling well. The cranberry juice would soothe her. Make her feel better. She poured herself a drop of cranberry juice into a highball and stared at it. All she wanted was relief from being awake at dawn. She couldn’t sleep, she didn’t want to eat, and there was nothing at all in the whole world she wanted to do. All she wanted was relief from this.
She went to her closet that was piled high with clothes on the floor, winter clothes that she no longer wore because they were in Hawaii. They weren’t needed the same way she wasn’t needed. She could be lying in a heap in the closet. Her hand deep down inside the sweaters, she rummaged for something, down below, layers hidden, to the right and at the bottom. It wasn’t hard to find. She struggled a bit and then pulled out a gallon, half-empty, of Gordon’s gin. Before Allison pulled it out, she felt around the bottom to make sure she still had another full gallon left. She did.
She brought it to the countertop where her cranberry juice waited for her. She stared at the highball for a moment, and at the bottle in her hands. She decided the hole inside her was too big today to fill with such a little glass. Tomorrow she would get herself in control. Tomorrow she could sleep past five, and maybe go for a walk with George … though what for? Really, what for? Why should she get herself in control even tomorrow? Like she had somewhere to go.
She unscrewed the top of the gallon of gin and with shaking hands lifted it to her mouth. The hands could barely hold such a heavy bottle. She opened her throat and poured the gin in, barely even needing to swallow. The bottle was much lighter, that was good. And her heart was much lighter. That was good too. So good.
She had to put the bottle away before she lost—
11 (#ulink_89143772-8c9f-5ba2-b9b4-b32353c83fd9)
Spencer Patrick O’Malley and Lilianne Quinn (#ulink_89143772-8c9f-5ba2-b9b4-b32353c83fd9)
To get out of the heat of her broiling apartment, Lily was sitting in air-conditioned Odessa at eight on a Sunday evening having dinner when Spencer walked in. The diner was nearly empty, but she was hidden in a booth a few tables away from the front door and he didn’t see her. He went to the cash register, where Jeanette helped him. He was in jeans, and was wearing an incongruous denim jacket. Lily was nearly naked, she was so hot. Looking at his jacket only made her hotter. She didn’t want him to see her, so she slid down in the seat and surreptitiously watched his exchange with Jeanette.
He ordered a turkey club.
“Will that be to go or to stay, Detective O’Malley?”
Jeanette was twenty-nine and a waitress for eleven years.
He said it would be to go.
“Why don’t you stay for once? I’ll be glad to take care of you.”
And she giggled!
He said no thank you, just a turkey club, no mayo, a large coffee, a large Coke, and a cup of coffee while he waited.
Jeanette, all breasts and batty eyes, said she would be right back and went to the kitchen. Spencer turned away from the counter to look at the patrons in the diner. Lily slid down further in her seat.
He saw her.
She sort of smiled and waved, and closed her sketchbook as he walked over. She had been sketching the empty countertop of the diner on a Sunday night with herself not Jeanette standing behind it.
“Hello, Miss Quinn,” he said.
Lily said hello.
“Jeanette, I’ll have that coffee now, while I wait,” he said to the waitress, who brought him a cup, eyeing Lily with extreme displeasure as Spencer sat down in the booth across from her.
Lily asked if he was on duty today.
“No, I try not to work weekends,” he said.
He should have looked better for not working weekends. He looked wiped out, like he hadn’t slept in days. He was unsmiling until he surveyed the food in front of Lily—a BLT, a Greek salad, a slice of cheesecake, Jell-O, and bread pudding.
“Hungry today?” He smiled slightly.
A little sheepishly she told him she never knew what she was going to feel like until it was right in front of her.
Jeanette brought Spencer his brown paper bag, placed it in front of him and said, "Here’s your stuff, Detective O’Malley. Would you like me to ring you up now?”
Spencer said, “On second thought, I will stay and have it here. Could you bring me some mustard, please?”
They ate their food quietly. She was a bit more chatty than he. She asked him why the jacket in the heat and Spencer pulling it open and revealing the holster with a weapon in it, said, "I prefer not to brandish the Glock when I’m off duty. Makes people nervous."
She asked why he carried a piece if he was off duty.
He said, “The gun may be smaller, but I’m required to carry it at all times. Off duty is just for pretend. To deceive us into believing we’re fairly compensated for our trouble. We’re never off duty. New York City would go broke if they had to pay us for 24/7 of service.”
She asked if he lived around here, if this was his local diner. He seemed to be so well-known by Jeanette—though Lily didn’t say that.
“No, I live on 11th and Broadway.”
Oh, she said, that’s so close to Veniero’s! that sublime bakery.
“I wouldn’t know. Never been there. Don’t care much for sweets.” He eyed her dessert buffet. She shrugged, and said that she did care a little bit for sweets.
They finished eating and paid their separate checks. Jeanette seemed pleased by the separateness. Spencer opened the door for Lily, and Lily was pleased by that.
“You spell your name oddly,” Spencer said, as if making a statement of extreme importance and fascinating fact.
“Oddly, why?”
They were walking back from Odessa. It was dark now and warm; they were full. Spencer slowed down a bit, Lily slowed down a bit, they were sauntering. From a bar they passed on Avenue A, loud music blared. Bruce Springsteen was out in the street/walking the way he wanted to walk. Spencer hummed part of the song before he answered. “I don’t know. Lily-Anne. I’ve heard of Lilian with one ‘el’ and Lillian with two. But Lili-ANNE?”
Lily couldn’t tell if he was teasing her, she didn’t know whether to tease back or proceed with solemn caution. In the end she opted for caution. “I was born sixteen years after my brother was born, and my mother, having forgotten that she already named my oldest sister Anne, wanted to name me Anya, or Anita, or something like that. My father said they already had an Anne, but my mother didn’t see his point. They didn’t have an Anita. My father asked if they were Hispanic. That’s when my mother came up with Anya. No Anya, my father said. No Anastasia, no Anika! They had an Anne. No more Anne. So my mother’s valiant compromise, as she calls it to this day, was to name me Lilianne. So she could still get that Anne in there. I don’t know how my dad agreed.”
Spencer smiled and when he looked at her, he looked at her differently, with more familiarity. “I know how he agreed. The way my father agreed. When I was born my mother put on my birth certificate Patrick O’Malley, and never told my father. She called me Baby for the first three months of my life, so my father never even knew the truth, and never asked, God bless him, until I started to smile.”
“You didn’t smile for three months?”
“Would you smile if you were called Baby for three months?”
“Good point. What was wrong with Patrick?”
“They already had a Patrick.”
Now it was Lily’s turn to look at Spencer differently. “They named you Patrick and there already was a Patrick?”
“Yes.”
“How many of you were there? Please tell me more than two.”
“Eleven.”
Lily’s eyes widened. “You might want to forgive your mother,” she said. “Eleven kids.”
“Who said I didn’t forgive my mother?”
“So did she nickname you Spencer for Spencer Tracy?”
“Correct.” Again looking at her with friendly approval.
“Spencer is a nice Irish name.” She stared at the pavement.
“Quinn is a nice Irish name. Why does your friend Paul call you Harlequin?”
Lily was discomfited. “Once he saw a clinch novel in my room. Has never let me forget it.”
“Oh, yeah? My sisters read those and never stop torturing me. According to them the only way I’ll get hitched is if I become more like the man from one of those novels. From which series was your book? Temptation or Intrigue?”
“Blaze,” said Lily, flushing with embarrassment and then laughing when she saw Spencer’s amused face. They were at her apartment, and she had a tinge of regret that the stroll was over so soon.
“So why did your mother like the name Anne? Who is Anne?” “I don’t know. My mother just likes that name.”
“Likes that name a lot,” Spencer said thoughtfully.
Lily glanced at him from the top of her stoop. “Detective O’Malley,” she said, teasingly, “I’m sorry to inform you but my mother’s preference for the name Anne is not one of your MP investigations.”
“Don’t be so sure. What about your other sister? She’s just plain Amanda.”
“That was my mother’s continued subterfuge over my father. AmANNEda.”
Spencer grinned. “Your brother? Was he spared?”
“ANNE-drew.”
Spencer laughed. And then he said, “Oh, of course—your brother is the Andrew Quinn, the congressman for the first district?”
“Yes. The Andrew Quinn.”
“Well, congratulations. He was just re-elected last year, wasn’t he? I remember it vaguely. That was a squeaker.”
“You can credit me for that squeaker, I campaigned for him. Me and Amy. And it was a landslide compared to his first election against Abrams.”
She opened her front door, while he remained at the bottom of the stoop. “Very, very interesting, Lily Blaze Harlequin. Well, good night. I still say you might want to look into your mother’s regard for the name Anne.”
“Thank you, Detective O’Malley, in my copious free time I’ll do that.”
“Miss Quinn, you can call me Spencer.”
Lily had a smile on her face the entire five flights of stairs.
12 (#ulink_3aeb38a8-e345-5fa3-8a88-f28d66bfe12a)
A Little Rented Honda (#ulink_3aeb38a8-e345-5fa3-8a88-f28d66bfe12a)
Lily was having a rare and desultory conversation with her mother and she could tell it was desultory by the amount of quick, sloppy black circles she was dashing off on her sketchpad, wearing down her nub of charcoal, getting black all over her fingers and her quilted bedspread. She had just come out of her bath—she had been taking baths for a while now, she found herself too tired to stand in the shower.
Now she was feeling relaxed and sleepy, but her mother was keeping her on the phone. Lily was on her new comfy bed, with the sky-blue curtains behind her tied in bows, billowing in the hot breeze. Black circles, black. Blah blah blah. Then her father came on the line and said, “Did your mother tell you she drove the car into a ditch?”
There was silence.
“Can you get off the phone?” said Allison. “Can’t you see I’m talking to my daughter?”
“What ditch?” said Lily incongruously.
“Oh, just a little ditch, by the house,” said Allison.
“Your mother means a ravine, Lil. She crashed the car into a ravine, left it there, and now has to go to court to explain to the judge why she would leave a perfectly good Mercedes in a ditch without notifying either a tow company or the police.”
Allison had nothing to say to that.
And the only thing Lily said to it was, “Is that the first time Mom drove the car into a ditch?”
“Yes, it was an aberration,” Allison said.
“Oh, yeah?” said George. “Tell that to the stop sign you plowed through and knocked over on Wailea Drive last month.”
“It doesn’t count,” said Allison. “That was a little rental car. A Honda.”
“Your mother is on a lot of medication, Lily,” said George, realizing perhaps how all this was sounding. “Sometimes it knocks her out. Makes her shaky behind the wheel.”
Lily called back the next morning when she was pretty certain her mother was asleep. “Papi,” she said, “You can’t let Mom drive a car. The first time was a stop sign, the second time was a ditch, but the third time is going to be a woman with a baby carriage.”
“I know, you don’t think I know? I know! Who lets her? I don’t let her. I tell her all the time I’ll drive her anywhere she needs to go. What else do I have to do? But she says she wants to run out for fifteen minutes to the drug store. And Lily, think about it, what am I, her policeman? Did I retire so I could police your mother? She is a grown woman. She knows when she should and shouldn’t drive.”
“I don’t think she knows. I don’t think she should drive at all. At the best of times she’s a bit … erratic.”
“I don’t know this? I know this better than you, daughter.”
“What’s wrong with her, Papi?”
“Ah. You know your mother. She loves her histrionics. She loves for everything to be about her. Look at me, I’m sick, I’m depressed, I’m not well, I’m going to court. What a sham it all is. There is nothing wrong with her.”
Lily waited. “Nothing?” she said.
“There is one thing wrong with her. She keeps falling down. She can’t walk down the one step to the sunken living room, or up one step to the front door to get the mail without falling down. You should see her legs. You wouldn’t believe what they look like. And her arms. They’re covered with black and blues. You almost can’t imagine how terrible and bruised her legs look. And your mother has such nice legs, as you know.” George chuckled. “If someone didn’t know any better, you’d think she was a battered wife.”
Listening, falling in her sadness for her mother, Lily said, “A person who can’t walk down one step into the sunken living room should not be driving.”
“Don’t tell me. Tell her.” He paused. “She’s sleeping now. Is that why you called? But you know, she doesn’t go out that often. Not often at all. Maybe once a week. She suddenly rushes out. And usually it’s after a good week.”
“‘Good’ meaning … ?”
“Meaning, she’s not screaming, or upset, or incoherent. She even goes walking with me. Then suddenly she rushes out, and things turn bad again for a few days, for a week. I think those meds she keeps taking are no good for her.”
“Papi?” Could Lily get the words out? She took a deep breath. “Something is wrong with mom. She … could she be …”
“What?”
Lily said nothing. She was such a coward.
“What? Drinking, you think?” George said finally.
She let out her breath. “Yes.” What relief. Yes! Drinking. And she didn’t even have to say it.
“No, no. I don’t think so.”
Lily waited. George waited. “Papi, could she be running out of alcohol and then driving to go get it?”
“I don’t think so. She comes back with bags of stuff: shampoo, soap, lotions, bleach, her pills. I carry the bags in for her. I know what’s in them. There is no liquor in the bags.”
“Okay, Papi.”
Lily thought on the way to work that she hoped Spencer was a better investigator than her father, because otherwise Amy was doomed.
13 (#ulink_00b187fd-56eb-5490-b931-9185b4374a9b)
Lily and the City of Dreams (#ulink_00b187fd-56eb-5490-b931-9185b4374a9b)
One late Friday night Lily was wandering the streets of the East Village looking for the posters they’d hung up of Amy, wandering from Avenue C, Avenue B, Avenue A, First Avenue, Second Avenue, Lafayette, and on Broadway, in front of Dagostino’s she ran into Spencer who was with a thirtysomething woman, her arm through his. He was casually dressed in slacks and an NYPD light jacket, the woman was wearing a skirt and blouse. Her hair was long and brown. She was tall. Pretty.
Lily’s mouth had opened into a gleaming Hi! she had been so happy to see a face she knew, and then she saw the threaded arms and didn’t know what to do or say. Spencer said Hi, Lily, not gleaming, and—
Lily felt so unbearably awkward she wanted magic powers that would let her fall through the sidewalk and down into the firepit of hell. On a Friday night she runs into Spencer, grins like an idiot, and now the smile is cemented on her face, and she doesn’t know where to look, and how in the devil’s name is he going to introduce her, a lumbering oaf—
Spencer said, “Mary, this is Lilianne.”
That’s all he said. Lily shook hands with Mary, who smiled politely, so well-mannered, so groomed, like a smart poodle.
“Nice to see you,” said Lily, detaching herself. “Listen, gotta go, sorry,” waving and running into Dagostino’s to hide in the frozen food section. Oh, God!
After an unreasonable time in the French Fries and the Lean Cuisines, she left the store, and meandered back home, so absent-minded she nearly walked through Tompkins Park.
She was disgraced. She couldn’t think straight. She bumped into Spencer while by herself on a Friday night! What kind of a loser was she, roaming the streets of New York at midnight on a Friday? She was loser number six, that’s what kind, Amy knew six deadbeats, of which Lily was the last.
But also … while alone on a Friday night, she accidentally and surprisingly—even to herself—felt joy at seeing Spencer, a familiar face, a familiar person, and less joy when she realized he was not alone.
It was days later when Lily finally calmed down long enough to resign herself to the slight aching left by the memory of the female arm through his male arm. But not because … no, not at all because … it was nothing like that, he was too old and not her type, and she was too young and not his, obviously. She knew herself, she knew she was telling the truth—there was nothing untoward in her aching. It wasn’t because of him in the particular. It was seeing the warm female flesh through warm familiar male flesh—the companionship of coupledom that wounded Lily. They were all around her, she realized belatedly—on Friday nights, couples, arm in arm, walking through Greenwich Village in the summer, happy to be alive. And even Spencer, harassed, glum, overworked Spencer, who almost didn’t seem like he was a man, and yet, decidedly—a man! Not a detective, not a cop, not a professional, but a man, walking with a woman, who was touching him, and he was not objecting. That was the aching in Lily. The wanting of the wanting to feel. The envy and piercing sadness at the realization that someone, who she thought was her kindred spirit in this—who she also didn’t think felt—felt.
Rachel, ever at the ready as a matchmaker, promptly fixed Lily up on three dates, crash and burn all. One barely spoke English, here from Morocco on a student visa wanting to become a professional basketball player—this at barely six feet tall. Even Lily had more sense.
One was a senior management accountant with Deloit. He was thirty-one, short and square, but wore clothes that were too hip for him, and drove a flashy car and hung out in bars trying to pick up younger girls. He spent the entire dinner advising her to change her choice of future profession from “something in art” to something more sensible, and take a course to become middle management for a large brokerage firm. (“That’s where the money and the security is.”) Lily was surprised to find herself thinking how different Spencer seemed from this man, how sturdy and un-middle-aged, even though there was something slightly grave about Spencer, as if he walked around carrying the feeling that life had already passed him by.
The last one was a mixed-race kid from Coney Island, who was adorable, but was obviously on drugs from beginning of the date to the end, and possibly went into the men’s room to take another hit of whatever he was on (coke? heroin?) during their dinner on bar stools at a cheesy Mexican take-out in Clinton Hill. He was disjointed and could not focus on anything she was saying, which admittedly wasn’t much. But was he ever cute!
Lily asked Rachel not to set her up on any more dates. Rachel thought she was being too picky. “You’ve built a wall around yourself, a forcefield, and you’re not letting anyone near.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
“You can’t let Joshua have so much power over you, Lil.”
“He doesn’t have any power over me,” Lily protested.
But Paul, who had heard about their exchange, called the following day. “He has all the power. You gave it to him during your relationship, and you’re giving it to him still. Keep going out with the boys, be happy.”
Lily had gone out with the boys, but how could she be happy?
She felt something slipping away from her, but didn’t know how to fix it because she didn’t know what it was.
Just to show what kind of power he had over her, Joshua called, hemmed and hawed, asked a few perfunctory questions, and then asked for his TV back. Apparently Dennis’s broke. He came over for five tongue-tied minutes and took his TV! He asked Lily to open the door for him, and she crossed her arms and refused.
Paul stopped calling her Harlequin. She missed that. He stopped calling her as often. She missed that, too. He said he was busy, Rachel said she was busy—to think that Lily would care if Rachel was busy! But she did care, she did. Lily couldn’t help feeling a prickle of judgment coming from Paul and from Rachel, characterized by their uncharacteristic and displeasing aloofness—judging Lily for losing Amy and not knowing where she put her.
Spencer told her the yearbook had proved to be a dead end: Paul could not recall a single one of Amy’s other friends, not even visually. He pointed to three that looked familiar, but upon being checked out, they all turned out to be alive and well, and teaching or mothering on Long Island. Amy’s mother was also drawing a blank. The rest of Amy’s friends she could not recall, but Paul she knew well. Amy’s friendship with Paul was really, really well corroborated.
Chris Harkman remained behind the desk, plowing through Lily’s phone records. Despite thorough checking, Harkman could not find a smoking gun in the phone numbers. 90% of the calls were placed by Lily to her siblings and grandmother. In April, calls were placed to an upstate New York number. That damn Shona, still repeating like a bad taste in Lily’s mouth! Amy’s phone calls included ones placed to Paul, Rachel, Copa, to ask for shift switches, and that was all. Spencer said to Lily that Amy’s use of the phone seemed just like her ID on the dresser and her lack of mementoes from her two years on the road—all suspect because they were so circumspect. She was so careful, that Amy. “There is something I’m overlooking,” Spencer said. “I’m sure of it. I just don’t know what it is.” Amy left no clues behind because Amy meant to leave no clues behind. But did Amy mean to vaporize? Or was that the unplanned thing? One thing was certain: after May 14, and until Lily returned on June 4, there were no phone calls placed from the girls’ apartment. Wherever Amy was, she was no longer in the apartment after May 14.
After being seen with a grown-up woman on his arm, Spencer turned professional with Lily, careful and circumspect himself. The two of them would stand at the precinct, or at Noho Star, chat for a few minutes about yearbooks and phone records, and then he would be on his way. He stopped coming around or calling nearly as often—maybe twice a week, Lily would hear from him, about Amy. She missed him a little bit, missed something calming about him, something supportive, and sensible, and true.
New York, the city of dreams, the city of nightmares. New York for the poor, for the rich, for the homeless, for the multi-aboded, New York for the eight million people who roamed within. New York when it rained, they all went into the bookstores, and when the sun shone they sat on the grass in Central Park with their books. They complained that it was too noisy, too overpriced, too amphetamine-charged, too multicultural, too dusty. They all lived single in the great city, and when they got married and had children, many left. Lily’s friends, Erin and Michael, he a 24/7-admitted workaholic stockbroker for Shearson Lehman, moved out of New York when they had kids. They moved to New Jersey. They bought a high-rise apartment in the Palisades so Erin could look at New York whenever she wanted. He didn’t have to look, spending all his days there, in the World Financial Center, making millions, losing millions, clogging his arteries with stress and bad coffee.
But Lily wasn’t married and had no kids. There was nowhere else for her to go. She lived close to Lower East Side where her mother and grandmother first lived when they came to America, and every time she wanted to walk off a part of her life, she walked the streets of New York until she walked herself out of it.
But Lily couldn’t walk far enough to rid herself of the persistent nagging caused by Amy’s persistent, unending absence.
“It’s because you’re depressed and broke,” said her sister Anne. “The depression is depleting you from the inside out. Being broke sucks. But I gotta go, Lil.”
“It’s because you can’t walk off something like your roommate missing,” said her other sister Amanda. “Go dancing. That will cheer you up. Go ahead, like you used to. Everything will be okay. You’re young. But I gotta go, Lil.”
But Lily didn’t have the energy to go dancing.
Once I had been clarified by Joshua, by Amy. He’s not coming back, and until she returns I’m in limbo. Amy, come back and tell me what I’m supposed to do at twenty-four in the middle of my life. Define my life for me, Amy.
How long was she going spend all her earnings on Union Square Café’s exquisite calamari and yellow cabs? Until Amy came back.
How long was she not going to cash in her lottery ticket?
Until she found out who she was.
Until Amy came back.
As if not cashing it were insurance against the unthinkable.
Lily’s exhaustion got worse. Got so bad that she had to cut her hours from fifty to forty, to thirty-five, to twenty-five. She would sit down on her break and fall asleep, and once they couldn’t wake her. They got so scared, they had almost called 911. Turned out she had walking pneumonia. She took antibiotics and ate calves’ liver for dinner every day until she lost her appetite for everything, not just calves’ liver. She was afraid to get on the scale. Even Yodels didn’t tempt her. Though they tempted her in the Associated supermarket down the street. She had big plans for Yodels, for Chips Ahoy, for Mallomars, for Double Chocolate Milanos, for German Chocolate cake, for strudel, for Krispy Kreme donuts. Then she would come home and put her goods on top of her microwave. She would balance them delicately atop the microwave and once she sneezed and six boxes of Entenmann’s and Pepperidge Farm ended up on the floor. She didn’t pick them up for …
Well, they were still on the floor, and unopened.
It was warm, but she felt cold, bundling herself in a thick cardigan that belonged to Amy, and going to the movies to sleep.
Her mother sent money for August, threatening that it was going to be the last time. When Lily cut her hours down she asked for a little extra, but Allison refused to send it. She yelled into the phone for ten minutes, while Lily, phone cradled to her ear, sketched with her soft charcoal a large black mouth perpetually open in a screaming O.
“Your father is telling you venomous lies about me, I know. While I sleep, so sick, my body old, shaking, bruised, full of medicines that keep me alive, I know he calls you up and complains about me, tells you I’m drinking, but what about him, does he tell you about himself, how he refuses to be a man to his wife—”
“Got—To—Go—Mom. Got—to—go.”
She burned her forearm at work, and over days it became so infected it required emergency medical treatment and more antibiotics. She was a walking mold spore. She tried to eat yogurt to counteract the Ph imbalance in her body, but found that she had gone off yogurt. Lily kept bandaged the burn that wouldn’t heal. Not so much kept bandaged as kept hidden.
14 (#ulink_666d884c-0a43-5f17-9a48-01ab12f0f0b9)
Riding Shotgun (#ulink_666d884c-0a43-5f17-9a48-01ab12f0f0b9)
On Thursday, August 5, Claudia sat Lily down and said, “I’m not going to beat around the bush. The family is worried about you.”
Lily squeezed her hands together, realizing they were numb, released them and said, “Don’t worry, Grandma, I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“That’s not it,” said Claudia. “You’re not too tired to find a job, are you?”
“Oh, that.” Yes, too tired for that, too.
“Yes, that. The family wants to know if you’re looking for work. For meaningful work.”
“Tell them all, from me—no.”
“Stop wringing your hands. You’re not helpless. You’re a college graduate.”
“Not quite.”
“Well, that’s deliberate, you know it is. What, you didn’t know you needed one more class to graduate? One more! Three hours a week, three credits. You didn’t know that?”
I didn’t know that. Did she have enough energy to say it? “I didn’t know that.” Good, Lil.
“Puhlease.”
“Grandma, I was already taking eighteen credits last semester, the maximum you can take.”
“You could’ve gotten permission.”
“In case you don’t know, I work to pay my rent.”
“Your mother sends you half your rent. Your boyfriend, and Amy—they pay the rest.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me speaking to you these last three months, but Joshua’s been gone since April. And believe it or not but Amy has not paid her rent since she went missing in May.”
Claudia continued as if Lily hadn’t spoken. “I think you kept three credits, consciously or subconsciously, so that you could hang on to something, hang on and not move forward. I think you want to feel that you’re still unfinished.”
She wanted to tell her grandmother that she was still unfinished. Unfinished, unanswered, unformed. “I can’t have this conversation again. Here are the magazines.” She stood up from the couch and swayed.
“You’re not getting any younger, you know. Only you think your time is infinite. But you’re twenty-five next month. And soon your youth is gone. Ask your mother how she feels about her youth being gone.”
“I know how she feels. She’s told me enough times. And you know what, my mother has bigger problems than her youth being gone.”
“What kind of problems?”
“Never mind.”
“By the time I was twenty-four, do you know what I’d done?”
“Yes, I know, Grandma. You’ve told me—”
“I’d been in one concentration camp, Ravensbruck, and one death camp, Sobibor. I walked two hundred kilometers carrying your mother on my back. I lived in DP camps near Hamburg, sleeping on the ground for three months, and then in typhoid barracks. All this by the time I was twenty-four.”
“—A thousand times,” Lily finished quietly.
Claudia remained sitting. “What are you waiting for? You want to turn out like that young woman in Iowa?” She said nothing more, as if Lily should have intuited, or perhaps known the rest.
“What woman in Iowa?” Lily finally said in a flat drone.
“The woman, thirty-four years old, was riding in the passenger seat of her car and a landscaping block fell from an overpass and crashed through the windshield. It hit her in the face. A two-foot-square concrete block struck this woman in the face. What does this tell you?”
“She shouldn’t have been riding shotgun?” offered Lily.
“Exactly. Lily, don’t be caught in a passenger seat with a concrete block in your face.”
Lily wanted to tell her grandmother to stop, to desist for a moment, to remember Lily, to remember Lily’s life, that Amy was missing, that her mother was missing, that Joshua, yet another supposed constant, was missing. That even she, Lily, was missing. But no way to talk about that when her hands, her thighs were going numb, numb! No way to talk about anything. She left.
Friday night, August 6, Paul asked her to come watch him perform his music at Fez on Lafayette. Lily was happy to be asked, so she went but found it nearly impossible to remain upright. The noise, the smoking was debilitating to her in ways she could not explain. She left as soon as Paul’s set was over. At home the machine was chockfull. Rachel asked her to go to the movies. Amanda called to invite her for Sunday dinner. Anne called just to find out how she was doing. Her mother called, spoke in some sort of code. “Your father will be the death of me,” was all Lily could decipher. The coke-addled cutie-patootie called asking her for a drink but in Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I don’t do Manhattan, baby,” he said, “but boy do I do Bed-Stuy. Come out, I’ll show you a good time … like before.” She smiled. He had been such a good kisser.
But Lily didn’t do good time in Bed-Stuy anymore, not with the bruises that appeared on her legs, on her lower arms, on her shoulders. Bruises on her thighs, on her shins. She refused to notice them a week ago, thinking they would go away, not recalling when she had banged herself, but over the last weekend, she hadn’t banged herself at all, yet they appeared and stayed. The older ones weren’t turning yellow either. They remained black and blue, and new ones came, and grew while Lily slept. Did she fall and not know it? Did she bump into futons, furniture, flowerpots and not know it? Was she sleepwalking? Indeed, indeed she felt as if she were sleepwalking.
15 (#ulink_b9336c18-2e75-5223-93de-f36916808641)
Spencer’s Twelve Tickets (#ulink_b9336c18-2e75-5223-93de-f36916808641)
Thursday, August 12, Spencer asked Lily to come to the diner. They walked in clipped silence, she slowly. The numbness and heaviness in her legs made it difficult for her to keep up with him. It was a scorching New York evening, but she wore jeans and a long-sleeve Gap shirt to cover her bruises. No more skimpy shorts for Lily. Spencer walked alongside her, and once she thought he was going to offer her his arm, but he did not. Would she have taken it if he did? She would have taken it, and pretended for a warm second she was a Mary on a Friday night.
At the Odessa, they had barely sat down and ordered soup and stuffed cabbage before he said, “So I got to twelve.”
“What?”
Spencer pulled out the stack of lottery tickets out of his wallet. “Twelve. Remember I told you, when I get to twelve, I check them all at once?”
“Yeah … did you win?”
“No, believe it or not.”
“Hmm.”
He took out his notebook, flipped back several pages, and showed her the numbers 1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49. “But guess what? As I was checking mine, I came across these, from April 18, and they rang a small bell in my head, because I’d seen them before, you see, and I couldn’t remember where, but having searched your apartment, I had written these numbers down in my blotter.”
Lily was quiet for a long time and didn’t look at him. “All right. So? So, there’s a lottery ticket. So what?”
“So what? Lily …” Spencer put his hands, his notebook on the table, staring at her. “Did you … win the lottery?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know if it was the right date.”
“Oh, it’s the right date, all right.”
She didn’t answer. There was no question.
“What’s wrong with you?” said Spencer, and Lily for a moment, just like with her grandmother, didn’t know what he was referring to, so wrong was the feeling of malaise in her own body. “Don’t sit there and pretend that you have no earthly idea what I’m talking about when I say what’s wrong with you?”
“Did you come to deride me? Because I have no energy for it.”
“You have no energy for a lot of things.”
“And how’s that any of your business?” Lily’s face was harsh, angled. “Are we done here? I don’t owe you an explanation, do I?”
Spencer shook his head. “You don’t owe me an explanation, though I would like one.”
“Oh, Spencer.” Lily resisted the impulse to cover her face. “I have no explanation.”
“Did you win the lottery and not claim your ticket? Do you understand why that might seem slightly off the wall to a broke cop making seventy grand a year, talking to a waitress making maybe thirty?”
The sausage soup came. The stuffed cabbage, the Coke, the coffee. They remained untouched between them, as Spencer and Lily sat, she with her hands squeezed under the table, he with his fingers intertwined tensely above it.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Lily finally said.
“Look,” Spencer said. “It’s normal for you to be down on yourself. There is no denying that something terrible’s happened in your life. A young girl disappears, and despite a concerted effort of the New York police, involvement of the FBI, and a private detective, there is no evidence of her. She fell into the earth, she vanished into the air. She left the country. She is dead. She called no one, took no money out, packed nothing, left no note. One day she simply vanished. And we keep going over the same unfertile ground. We have nothing new to say, yet we keep picking at it like an unhealed sore, like the burn on your arm.”
“Detective,” said Lily and broke off. She was hoping her voice would be steady. “What if … how can I go on with my life if Amy—God help me—lost hers?”
“I don’t know.” Spencer wasn’t looking at Lily. “I don’t know how I went on when I lost my wife at twenty-three in a car accident. I didn’t win the flipping lottery, I can tell you that.”
“I’m sorry about your wife.”
“Don’t be sorry. It’s been many years, I’ve moved on. But why are you sitting in your room, looking at the four walls, at the six numbers on your cork board?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“So? Make yourself feel better. Paint. Did you do that oil on canvas I saw in your apartment? Of the girl in Times Square? It’s very good. Paint some more.”
“Don’t feel like painting.”
“So go out with your friends, go to a club, go to the movies. Go to dinner. Forget the guy who took your bed, he isn’t worth it. Go out with other guys.”
She shrugged. “Well, look, I’ve just decided that I’m single for a reason and that’s nothing to worry about. Annoying when I have to take the garbage out every Monday and Thursday night. But hey, some poor, desperate soul will find me in the end. That’s the thought I can cling to. And then you get into all the drama of having to be nice to people … who, me?”
“Lily …” he said soothingly, reaching over to touch her hand.
“I admit I’m a little bit stuck. But what about you, detective?”
“What about me? I’m not the point. I have a grown-up life. I’m not twenty-four. I haven’t won eighteen million dollars.”
And Lily wanted to say that she didn’t feel like she was twenty-four either.
49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
“Is it because of her that you haven’t claimed it?”
“Not really.” She didn’t want to look into his face.
“Why then?” he asked. “It goes against human nature. It goes against everything I understand about human beings and I make my living off my gut feelings.”
Lily couldn’t tell him that at the moment she was having some small spiritual difficulties, and she refused to muddle further her already muddled free choices by the temptation of an unsought—and unwanted—miracle. She did not know what kind of life she was supposed to, or even wanted to live but claiming the lottery would remove the choice from her, and even though she was wallowing and foundering and maybe even a little drowning, she didn’t want her Grandma-given, God-given freedoms trampled on in this way. An enslaved heart could not choose wisely—or unwisely. So even though these days she was mostly sleeping—she still wanted to reserve her rights for the just in case.
That is what she was thinking, but to Spencer what she was saying with a careless shrug, was, “I don’t know what to tell you. I just didn’t, that’s all.”
“Why would you not collect your money?”
Lily said nothing.
“Answer me, why?” He raised his voice.
Lily touched the cup of coffee. It was now cold. She motioned the waitress for another cup. But Spencer was still waiting for an answer. “Why are you yelling at me?” she said quietly.
“I want you to give me an explanation I can understand.”
“Detective O’Malley,” said Lily, “no matter how much you want it to, the lottery ticket is not going to figure into Amy’s disappearance.”
Undrunk coffee, uneaten soup, Odessa, August, numb legs, humid heat, noise, feebleness.
And Spencer leaned across the table, and said, “I’m just trying to talk to you, and you’re completely missing my point. Do something besides work and fret. Claim your money, move to another city, give it to the downtrodden, pour it into your brother’s senatorial campaign—anything—” He broke off suddenly, stopped talking, stared at her.
Lily didn’t know how she got up every morning. She had no idea how she was going to make good on her words to Andrew back in spring, when she said she would help him with his campaign.
Spencer was still considering her intently, his mouth mulling.
“What’s the matter?” she said, so tired.
He blinked, came out of it. “Nothing. I have to go. Get back to the precinct ASAP.” Standing up and taking out two twenties, he threw them on the table. “I thought we were a little bit friendly,” he said coldly, “could talk about things.” He walked out, leaving Lily alone at the diner.
The next morning, Friday, August 13, Lily was still asleep when the phone rang. She didn’t pick it up. It was Detective Harkman. He called again five minutes later. She didn’t pick it up.
Half an hour later, her door bell rang. That was just unfair. Through the intercom, Harkman’s voice sounded, “Miss Quinn, can we talk to you a moment?”
Unbelievable. She asked him to wait downstairs, while she quickly (molasses slow) got washed and dressed.
Outside, Spencer and Harkman were both waiting for her. Spencer didn’t look her way. Harkman said they needed to talk to her at the precinct. They drove her back in their patrol car. She sat in the back like a perp.
Back in room Interrogation #1, she was across the table, but from Harkman this time. Spencer stood in back of her with his arms crossed. She didn’t understand what was going on. Spencer was silent and cold.
“Miss Quinn,” Harkman said brusquely, his little eyes beading into her. “Something Detective O’Malley and I wanted to talk to you about, something we needed to ask you. Just a couple of questions really about a tiny inconsistency.”
Spencer said nothing. Lily wondered why he was letting Harkman question her, as if he were deliberately removing any personal connection between them, as if he were saying to her, fine, you treat me like I’m nobody, I’m going to treat you the same way—like you’re nobody. She felt a pang of guilt. Harkman was asking her something, but she was so flushed with remorse, she didn’t hear.
“Miss Quinn!”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Did you say you worked on your brother’s reelection campaign last year?”
“Yes.” She frowned.
“Did you tell Detective O’Malley that you and your friend Amy both worked on his campaign?”
“Yes, I probably mentioned that. We helped at the Port Jeff office. We got a college credit for it, for our political science course. Why?”
Harkman and Spencer exchanged glances. “In my notes,” and Harkman leafed through some papers, “in my work on the background of this case, I spent many hours calling the numbers on your phone statements. One of the numbers was your brother’s congressional office in Washington.”
“So? I call him there all the time.”
“Yes, yes. It took him a while to call me back; it says here in my report that I had to call him three or four more times before he would speak to me.”
“He’s always like that. I haven’t spoken to him in months.”
“Our conversation was very short. I asked if he frequently got phone calls from your apartment, and he said, once or twice a month, you would call him, and the phone records do confirm that, as well as his phone calls back to your apartment. Sporadically regular, I would say, lasting for twenty to thirty minutes.”
“Yes.”
“We had a very short chat and hung up, but not before I asked him if he knew Amy McFadden, and do you know what your brother said?”
Why did Lily’s heart start to beat so fast? What could he have said?
“He said, Miss Quinn, that he could not recall.”
In a voice that was not hers, Lily said, “Could not recall what?”
“Amy McFadden.”
They sat mutely, Spencer behind her, Harkman panting in front of her, while she herself thought she stopped breathing.
“I don’t understand what you’re telling me,” Lily said at last. “I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”
“I asked him if he knew your roommate, and he said that he really could not recall her. He said it twice. Then he had to go and we hung up. And we thought nothing more of it, because it was nothing, until yesterday when Detective O’Malley came in to the office, and brought it to my attention, this small contradiction.”
Nothing moved on Lily, except her head, which slowly and desperately turned to look at Spencer, her eyes pleading with him to help her, to explain, to make it clear and all right. “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” said Lily in a shaken voice.
“Miss Quinn.” That was Spencer. He finally spoke. His voice was like he did not know her. He came around the table and stood at its edge. “In light of what you’ve told me, it seems peculiar that your brother would say he didn’t recall your roommate when you and she helped him with his reelection. Either he doesn’t recall her, or she helped him with his campaign, not both. Both cannot be true. Either you are not telling us the truth—Amy did not help with his campaign. Or he is not telling us the truth, and indeed he does recall her.”
“Please,” whispered Lily. “I don’t know what you’re saying.” Her palms down on the table, Lily leaned forward, hyperventilation attacking her lungs. “Detective,” she said, trying to breathe slower, to keep her voice calm. She failed. “I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you’re implying … I don’t know what you’re asking me.”
“Could it be true, Miss Quinn,” said Harkman, “that Andrew Quinn does not recall Amy?”
“I guess so, it can be true, yes,” Lily said with breathless panic, placing her hand over her chest to still her heart. It was Impossible! Perhaps an interrogation room was not the place for such exclamations of the soul. Her voice lost its fight and got progressively weaker. She was whispering now. “It can be true.” She was nearly inaudible.
And then the three of them were silent. Spencer watched her, Harkman watched her, and Lily stared at the table. Her whole body felt to be suddenly emptied and re-filled with nerve endings, all shooting electrical anguish into her skin.
“Miss Quinn …”
“Please.” She jumped up. “If we’re done, I have to go. I do, I can’t sit here another minute.” Lily groaned in the middle of room Interrogation #1 and ran out. Spencer followed her. He stopped her on the street outside the precinct.
“Lily,” he said, slightly panting. “Are you running away from me?”
“Yes,” she blurted. “No.” She tried to push past him but he stood firm in front of her. “Just let me through. We’re done, aren’t we? Let me through.”
Spencer took her by her arms to stop her from moving. She was shaking.
“Please,” she said. “Leave me alone.”
“Lily,” he said gently. He was still holding her arms, he almost brought her to him in an embrace; she was too stirred up to know what it was. “I’m sorry. I am. We’re just trying to find Amy.”
“Oh, giving out traffic tickets on the LIE gives you experience in missing persons, does it?” Lily exclaimed, trying to wrest from him. Her knees were buckling from sadness. “No,” she said, furiously shaking her head. “No!” Even more adamantly. “Whatever it is you’re thinking, there’s a simple explanation.”
“I’m not thinking anything.” He let go of her, and she stood still, but leaned against the dirty wall of the building. “You’re the one doing all the thinking. Because you’re the only one who knows whether his statement is true.” Spencer looked at the pavement. “And from your reaction, it seems to me that you know it can’t be.”
Turning her head to look inside a window pane, the glass reflecting off her own filmed over glass eyes, Lily put her hands over her face, struggling to keep the tears back.
When Spencer got back to his desk, he sat down heavily, looked around the office, and thought it was time to go—perhaps permanently. Harkman sitting across from him was by contrast jubilant. “Finally! A break in the immovable case. A lead.”
“Yeah, a lead.” After a few minutes Spencer said, “I think Sanchez and Smith can handle it from here.” He turned to Harkman on the swivel chair. “I’m going to give this to them. I can’t do it, Chris. I have to get off this case.”
“Which case? The McFadden case?”
Spencer nodded.
“What the hell are you talking about? We finally made some headway. A U.S. Congressman!”
Blood ties. Brother and sisters. How Spencer craved a drink. “I know. That’s just the thing. I can’t do it.”
“O’Malley, what’s gotten into you?”
Spencer thought back to the white, wet buildings of Hanover, New Hampshire, to Dartmouth College, to the black shutters on his soul; thought back to Greenwich, Connecticut and the tangled web he had once weaved investigating another missing girl and the duplicity and manipulation of the ones closest to her. Their squalid story swallowed him. He couldn’t go back to that place twice. It took him years as a traffic cop on the Long Island Expressway before he could face being a proper investigator again. There were some things in life for which once was enough. There weren’t many of them. Many of life’s offerings were renewable pleasures, like sex, or renewable miseries, like alcohol. But this drowning in shallow waters was not something he wanted to relive even while saturated in Scotch.
“O’Malley, you’re overwhelmed. Give your smaller cases to me. Concentrate on this one.”
“I’m not overwhelmed. Stop psychoanalyzing me. This is precisely the one case I don’t want. I’ll keep the smaller ones. I got plenty else I need to be doing, and you, too. Sanchez and Smith are more than capable of taking over for us.”
“I don’t want them to take over for us! This is a big case. A Congressman, O’Malley! There might be another promotion here for me and for you, too. I’ve got a family to think of. I’ve had three heart operations. What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Chris, I’m sorry. I just don’t want to do it. What can I tell you?”
“But you’re the one who came to me with this!” Harkman exclaimed. “You’re the one who remembered reading what Andrew Quinn had said. I mean, what the hell? Why are you doing this?”
Spencer wasn’t about to explain anything to Harkman. “You can’t change my mind. I don’t want to get mired in this. There’s too much baggage here for me. I’m putting Sanchez and Smith on it.”
“No, you’re not, O’Malley.”
Spencer’s clouded gaze cleared slightly.
Harkman stood and came over to Spencer’s desk, leaning over him. Spencer moved away, and it must have seemed like wariness, thought it was nothing but distaste. “You selfish bastard,” Harkman said. “You think you’re the only one who knows things. But I know things, O’Malley, I know things about you, the kind that Internal Affairs would be very interested in hearing. I’ve been very good to you, but don’t fuck with me on this one, because I need this case. As always, you’re only thinking of yourself.”
Spencer looked steadily at Harkman’s small angry eyes, at his swollen, contorted face. “Don’t come any closer to me,” he said, standing up himself, and pushing his chair away. “What could you possibly know about me?”
Harkman backed away, half a step. “O’Malley, I promise you. You fuck me over, I’m going to fuck you over, and good. You want a leave of absence? I’ll make sure you get a nice long one.” Harkman stormed out of the office—like a wounded woman.
Spencer sank back down at his desk. What the hell was Harkman talking about? Was he being selfish? Probably. He did not think of how giving this case to Sanchez would affect Harkman. He only thought of how it would affect him—whether he could handle it. He didn’t think he could. He couldn’t tell Harkman that what he wanted was … not to get personally involved, not to hurt Lily. If she was going to be crushed, he didn’t want her crushed at his hand. His recusal would be the kindest thing, the best thing for her—and certainly the best thing for him. Spencer felt the murkiness, instinctively sensed the muddy and shallow waters, the swamp of design instead of the ether of accident on Amy’s vanishing.
His feeling for his partner changed for the worse. Even more than most people, Spencer hated to be threatened. Of course Harkman was just bluffing. Spencer did have some secrets to keep, and he kept them, certainly from his relatively new partner, practically a stranger. He grabbed his jacket and left.
16 (#ulink_3737c14a-927a-526a-8bad-986229bea439)
Reality: The Actual Thing that it Appears to Be (#ulink_3737c14a-927a-526a-8bad-986229bea439)
Lily let him in, but so reluctantly she didn’t even open the door all the way. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said coldly, but couldn’t help noticing his drawn face, the somber twist of his mouth.
“I want you to come with me,” Spencer said, pushing the door open and walking in, “I want to go talk to your brother.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Spencer took a deep breath. “Do you want to help him or don’t you?” He walked into Amy’s room.
She followed him. “How is talking to him going to help him?”
He was looking around, swirling his hand through the air. “Lily, once again you’re deliberately misunderstanding me. You and I can go and talk informally to your brother right now in his home or my partner and I will have to pay him a police visit.”
“Detective O’Malley,” Lily said, wringing her hands in supplication. “Don’t you understand? My brother, Andrew Quinn, is a U.S. Congressman
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