The Girl in Times Square
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
The Disadvantages of Walking to Work
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
Ignorance in Amy’s Bed
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.