The Girl in Times Square (35 page)

Spencer and Lily had been walking home one night from Odessa, and a stringy guy accosted them. “I’m not going to bullshit you,” the guy said, a Michael Jackson lookalike, tall, skeletal, barely standing. “I need a dollar to score some scag. Can you give me a dollar?”

Spencer took out his badge and stuck it in the guy’s face. “You’ll spend the rest of your life in jail if you don’t clean up. Get away.”

“What are you shoving in my face, man?” the guy said, as if he were blind. “That’s not a dollar.”

“NYPD. Get the fuck away, I said.” Spencer put his arm around Lily to cover her, to prod her forward.

They continued walking. “Lily, don’t ever walk through Tompkins Square at night alone, all right?”

“Like I would.”

That was then. This was now. With the gateway to hell behind her, at two in the morning Lily walked through Tompkins Square and sat on the bench and watched wasted people shuffle through the paths, talking to themselves or to each other, rummaging in their ripped pockets, adjusting their rags, looking for a lost bill, or a bit of old powder that they could eat or snort. People smelling like nothing else on earth, human bodies, caked with sweat and feces, unwashed for months, decaying, and still they shuffled and
begged to score some H for a dollar from an NYPD cop. Lily didn’t sit for long, just long enough to wish to be home, to be in bed, to forget this day, this sixteenth day of her deadened life.

Leaving through the iron gates of the park, she was suddenly shoved from behind by a man also heading out of the park, so close as if he had been walking right behind her. He was moving fast, nearly running; he bumped into her with more force than her startled body could handle and then grabbed her elbow and did not let go. Lily screamed. But not because she had been nearly knocked down. It was this man—his face from a nightmare, from a horror movie Lily had never seen. He smelled like a bum, preternaturally foul, unforgivably filthy, but somehow he had found money to wear regular clothes—jeans, a black jacket—to cut his hair completely off. He was bald, with words tattooed above his eyebrows. Lily couldn’t read the words because she was being overcome by a blinding terror. His eyes were slit and bloodshot, and were the color of crystal blue, like slivers of polished-by-ocean glass. They were almost transparent. Under them he had blood welts and black and blues. One eye had been partially closed after a beating, and one of his front teeth had been knocked out; his nose was badly broken once, twice. He looked menacing and strung out, he looked starved and heartless. Lily gaped at a wide black bruise on his neck, but realized it was another tattoo, a faded hammer and sickle covering his Adam’s apple. Her mouth fell open, she was paralyzed and breathless while he stared at her intensely, panting.
And he wasn’t letting go.
His mouth stretched into a grimace, exposing his decaying teeth, and a raspy grating whisper came out of him. He whispered—or she thought he whispered—“
Lily.
”

Someone rushed up to her in the nighttime street, a stranger. “Hey! what’s going on here?” and the man released her, and ran, and Lily, out of her mind with fear, ran too without looking back, ran down the block and across Avenue C, ran terrified that he
was right behind her. Once inside her building, she flew up the stairs and fumbled for her key, her heart beating so furiously she was sure heart attacks started with less, her heart fully ready to explode and burst out of her chest.

After locking and chaining and barricading the door with the phone desk and a single dining room chair she owned, Lily called, she paged him, and then she went into the bathroom and threw up the pound of cherries she had just eaten. At three in the morning the phone rang, and having barely cleaned herself up she ripped the receiver off the base. “God, Spencer! You have no idea what just happened to me.”

“Lily, it’s Papi.”

“Oh my God. Papi, do you have any idea what time it is?” She was panting, she could barely get the words out. Was that call waiting? She couldn’t get the deafening whisper out of her ears.

“Lily, it’s only nine in the evening here in Maui. But something’s happened. Your mother called the police an hour ago and told them I beat her.”

“Oh, Papi. Is she drunk?”

“What do you think? Can’t you hear her in the background?”

Lily could barely hear him in the
fore
ground.

“Did you…beat her?”

“Lily!”

“All right. So when they come tell them that.”

“Is this a good time?”

“It’s never a good time.” Holding on to the phone table, Lily closed her eyes.

“I think she’s hurt herself. There’s blood in the bathtub. And—I don’t know, but she can’t walk anymore. I think she fell while getting out of the tub.”

Lily stayed on the phone. Her father smoked. “They’re here. The doorbell just rang. I’m on the lanai, my back is to them.” He continued to smoke. “Sit with me on the phone, Lily,” he said. “Be close to me on the phone.”

They came onto the lanai, and he said, “You want to talk to my daughter? She can tell you everything.”

A man’s voice said, “She is not involved.”

Papi said, “No, she is very much involved, she knows everything.”

A man said, “You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say can and will be held against you. You have the right to an attorney. Do you understand these rights as they have been explained to you?”

Lily’s father said yes.

The police officer came on the phone. “Please,” Lily said, “you cannot arrest him, he is an innocent person, all his life all he’s been trying to do is help her.”

The police wouldn’t have any of it. “Your mother is quite intoxicated. We see that. She has a bad laceration on the back of her head, but she refuses to go to the hospital and she is having trouble walking. But if she says your father did this to her, we have to take him in. If he cannot post a thousand dollars bail, he will spend the night at the precinct and tomorrow go before a judge and enter a plea. He’ll have to be arraigned and then appear in court.”

Lily said dully, “Let me speak to my mother.”

Allison came on the phone and said, “I cannot talk to you right now,” and hung up.

Lily called back four times. Allison said I’m busy right now, I cannot get your father, I’m too busy to get him. She said, “Don’t call and waste your money, give it to your older sister.”

When Lily called back again, the police officer said to her, “It is obvious you have to come, he cannot handle this situation on his own. Does he have any friends here who can help him?”

Her father came on the phone. “When I come back from jail I’m packing my bags and leaving. I can’t take this anymore.”

“Papi!” shouted Lily. “Tell them you didn’t do it, tell them you never touched her.”

“I can’t. They won’t listen. They’re saying if there is an accusation of spousal abuse, they have to arrest me.” His voice trembled. Her father had never been arrested for anything in his life.

“This is ridiculous. She is so clearly drunk!”

“They don’t care. Lil, can you talk to them? I need your help, daughter. I don’t know what to do. Please can you talk to them? Is your detective friend there? Maybe he can talk to them. I don’t judge him, you know. I know he is just doing his job.”

Lily’s own voice nearly broke when she said, “He’s not here, Papi, but let
me
talk to them.”

He put a Hawaiian-sounding polite man on the phone, who listened to her, who was courteous, who understood, “but my hands are tied. It’s the law here in Maui. If a spouse calls in an abuse on her spouse, we have to arrest the accused. Don’t worry. He will go to the police station and make bail, and then he can go. But he cannot show up at your mother’s for twenty-four hours. You have to explain the situation to him, Miss Quinn. He doesn’t seem to understand it’s the law.”

“Oh, he understands,” said Lily. “He just doesn’t believe it.”

Her father came on the phone. “Lily, what am I going to do? How am I going to get out of this?”

She told him not to worry, that he would be all right.

“I need help,” he said. “I cannot deal with your mother anymore. This is just the last straw in what she has put me through the last year, ever since I proposed that we sell the condo and move back east. You have no idea what my life has been like.”

I have some idea, Lily wanted to say to him. “Papi, I’m not the best person for this. I’m the worst of all your children for helping my mother. I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

“Please, Lily, they’re arresting me, don’t you understand, and your mother cannot be left alone, you don’t understand what state she is in. Don’t you see? You have to come.”

“Papi, how can I come?”

“I’ll pay for it, if that’s what you’re worried about. I have some money of my own. I have my own account now. Your mother has not completely emasculated me.”

“I’m not worried about that…”

“So come then. Talking to your mother, trying to help her, putting yourself on the line, even when you know she doesn’t want it, giving her what she needs because you know she needs it, that’s what love is. Fly first class if you have to. I’ll pay. I have to go now. I have to go and be booked and fingerprinted like a common criminal. Now I understand what Andrew was afraid of.”

Lily felt the rebuke even if there wasn’t any.

My father beats against the wall. I am my father’s daughter, and I beat against the wall.

Before the police took him away, Papi said, “Lily, I love you.”

Towards dawn, her mother called.

“What have you done?” Lily said. “Papi is in jail, Mom. Jail! What have you
done
?”

She said, “He beats me.”

“Mom, the police will find out you’re lying and they’ll arrest
you
!”

“I don’t need you to get hysterical on me, shut up shut up shut up.” And hung up.

Lily called back six or seven times and Allison hung up each and every one of them.

The last time she said, “Soon I’ll be dead and you’ll all be happy.”

“You cannot go to God this way, Mother,” said Lily. “I’d ask Him for help if I were you.”

Allison hung up.

Lily barely slept, kept awake by the anxiety of the terrible face in the park, of his hands on her. Was she mistaken? Were they
on her
? Holding
her
? Did he follow her, stand near Broadway,
watching her waiting for Spencer? It was inconceivable and terrifying.

The next morning Lily was on the plane to Maui. She barely even packed. She took a couple of summer outfits, a bathing suit, her sketchbooks and an empty suitcase, in case her father wanted to come home with her, come back with her. She took it to save him.

Spencer didn’t call before she left.

Lily didn’t even know what flight she was taking. She just asked the driver to take her to JFK, and once there, she opted for Delta, who had the first flight out. She bought a first class ticket, and was in the air in two hours.

Unraveled at home and abroad, unraveled at sea and in the air.

Unraveled—to begin to fail, or to come to an end.

Sunday.
The LAX airport is so uncosy, and there is fog in LA, you can’t see the sky, but Lily bet the air smelled nice, and it looked like it was warm. “They put handcuffs on me,” George had told her just before she got on the plane. “They hurt. No one talked to me. I couldn’t call you earlier because I was in jail.” And he laughed!

But he wasn’t in jail. He bailed himself out immediately. Wasn’t that story good enough? He was arrested on false charges, wasn’t that enough drama? No, he had to say he was in jail, though clearly he was at the police station for the shortest possible time.

And now George was pretending Lily was coming for a visit. “What would you like to eat? I’ll make you dinner. Would you like shrimp? I can make very delicious shrimp with celery.” Lily answered dumbly,
sure,
though she hated celery.

What was he doing at the house? Lily thought he was supposed to keep away for twenty-four hours? Whatever, since he was there, why wasn’t he packing his stuff? Didn’t he tell Lily he was getting his bags and leaving? Yet there he was, making dinner, smoking, saying he would meet Lily at the airport and she must not rent a car because he had the Mercedes and it was at her disposal. Didn’t he know Lily had never learned to drive?

She had sat in the driver’s seat of Spencer’s car. The engine
was on. Her back was against the wheel, her legs and arms were wrapped around Spencer.

Did that count as driving?

I’m ridin’ in your car/you turn on the radio…

On the flight Lily read most of the
Understanding the Alcoholic
book, but what she really wanted to do was not think about her mother, which was ironic considering her mission. She succeeded because most of the way she thought about Spencer.

Her father was waiting for her at the airport. She hadn’t seen him in so long. He was salt-haired, full-haired, heavy now. They hugged.

“Lily, you have to be prepared for how you’re going to find your mother. She is in a terrible state.”

“I understand.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think you do. You’ve never seen her this way. She is really banged up and…” he broke off. “I think there is something wrong with her toe. You’ll have to take a look at it and tell me.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”

“Am I a doctor?”

“No, but…you’ve been sick. You know about such things. By the way, how are you feeling?”

He didn’t wait for Lily’s answer. They talked about nothing else but Allison all the way through the volcanic hills of Maui, from Wailuku, and no matter how she tried, she could not remember the name of the airport they had just left. Lakuhui? Walakui? Somethinglui?

In the apartment, clothes were hanging everywhere, towels had been left damp too long, sinks full of toothpaste and soap residue, hair on the floor, carpets all askew, stuff everywhere, unfresh odors.

Before Lily went in to see her mother in the bedroom, George insisted Lily eat some dinner. Tuna sashimi on the lanai. He told
her he walked home twelve miles from the police station. “Do you know what it’s like to walk that long and think about your life? It’s very mind-cleansing.”

“Papi, I thought you were going to leave.”

He shook his head. “Lily, you don’t understand. Your mother can’t be left alone. She has to be seen to be believed.”

“I’m going to go and see her then. Thanks for the fish.”

Her mother was sleeping on her high bed, and she did not stir until Lily woke her. Allison said, “What, came here to comfort your father?” She could barely speak. She did let Lily touch her and look at her toe. Oh my God, thought Lily, the toe. It was definitely a compound fracture, with the white bone sticking out, the back of the toe nearly sliced off, and the toe itself all twisted back. For some reason the foot around the toes was looking unwell, blistery and swollen, but it could have been the dim lighting. Lily tried to turn on the light to get a better look—she was scared by the bone sticking out—but Allison wouldn’t allow it.

“Mom, when did this happen?”

“How do I know?” Allison replied slowly. “Maybe when I fell in the bathtub, or when I was trying to get out. It’s my head that’s much worse. I have a crack in my head. Want to see?” She turned herself sideways and parted her hair in the back. Blood had caked around the injury and dried in the hair. It was difficult to see the actual wound.

“We have to take you to the hospital,” said Lily

“No!” Allison said adamantly. “No hospital. Absolutely not.”

“What are you talking about? You have to go to the hospital.”

“I have to do no such thing. We don’t all love hospitals like you do, Lily. We’re not all so comfortable in them. I don’t need the hospital. The head is feeling better, and the foot will heal. I think I may have had a concussion, you know.”

Lily called the only hospital in Maui, the Maui Memorial, and said the words
compound fracture.
A nurse directed her to call Urgent Care in Maui on South Kihei Road, which she did. The receptionist there didn’t know what a compound fracture
was. “So is the toe broken or not?” This was said in between gum chewing. Lily asked to speak to the doctor and wouldn’t take no for an answer. But the doctor at Maui Urgent Care, Dr. Tavakoli, said, “If it’s a compound fracture, I don’t know why they would tell you to call here. You
must
go to the hospital. A compound fracture can get infected very quickly, especially in the extremities where the oxygen supply is low.”

Allison said she wasn’t going to the hospital. It was too late. It was nine o’clock in the evening. George, having spent all day, all long day, filling out paperwork at the public defender’s office, cooking, taking care of his sick wife, did not want to go either. He said, if we still need to, we’ll go tomorrow.

Monday.
In daylight, there was no hiding from
the toe.
Distinctly there were bubbles under the skin around it, bubbles at the top of her foot. It was a funny brownish color, and it smelled. Lily recoiled from the foulness and said, “That’s it, we’re going to the hospital.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” said Allison.

“Leave her alone, Lil,” said George. “She’ll be fine. Leave her be, the toe will heal.”

“The foot is going brown,” Lily told 911.

They came in five minutes. The paramedics walked in wearily, as if they had been down this road before, in this house before. In seconds, they had Allison on a stretcher and inside the ambulance. They were speeding away before Papi could say, “We’ll be right behind you.”

The stressed, overworked, impatient triage nurse looked at her dismissively until she saw Allison’s oozing toe and bubbling brown foot. Then she was straight away calling for the attending physician. Once inside Trauma One, Allison began crying and saying this was the end of her miserable life, but young tall thin unsmiling Dr. Aillard was focused on her foot.

He said to Lily, drawing her away from the bed where Allison was acting delirious, “Do you know what moist gangrene is? Gas gangrene?”

Lily shook her head.

“It’s worse than dry gangrene, when there is uniform tissue death. Now what’s happening is the still-living cells are leaking fluids, making the surrounding areas moist. Bacteria flourishes, hence the term moist gangrene. Well, your mother’s gangrene has taken an even worse turn. The bacteria in the dying cells have begun to produce a deadly gas, and this gas thrives in lowoxygen areas like her broken toe. Brown pus, gas bubbles.” Aillard stopped looking at Lily. “This poison spreads rapidly, causing high fever.”

“Well, that’s why she’s in the hospital!” Lily exclaimed. “Fix her.”

“It’s good that you brought her,” the doctor said simply. “This saved her life. But…we cannot save her foot.”

Lily had to sit down.

“We’re going to put her on antibiotics. But the foot will have to be removed surgically. Tell me, what is going on with your Mom—is she drinking?”

Lily stared at him, words failing.

“Is she drinking?” the doctor persisted.

Lily found herself nodding, yes.

“Is she sober enough for me to explain all this to her?”

“I don’t think
I
will ever be sober enough for you to explain this to her,” Lily said.

The thing itself took no more than thirty minutes. George remained outside, smoking. When he came back in, it was over.

“Well,” he said. “Well, well.” He couldn’t say any more. “We should go home. You must be tired. You should call your brother, your sisters. Tell them what happened to their mother.”

“And Grandma.”

“And Grandma,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “Where do you get that energy from? You’ve been up a long time.”

Lily had had three hours sleep in forty-eight. She had missed
her blood work, had not spoken with Spencer. She wanted to call him but, like the apprehended, she only had one phone call in her. She called Grandma. No news could spread faster than news told to Grandma.

At home when they searched Allison’s closet, they found a big, nearly full bottle of gin. Papi first said, yes, we have to take it away, then he said, but if we take it, she is never going to give the statement to the DA to get them to drop the charges against me.

But he took it and hid it in the trunk of the Mercedes. He didn’t pour it out because, he said, “It’s a sin to pour out perfectly good liquor.”

Tuesday.
Lily didn’t recognize any of the morning smells in Maui. George wanted to go to the beach, seemingly not remembering any of the anguish he felt the night he begged Lily to come to Maui or his wife, the amputee.

“Papi, we have to take care of the police thing before we start gallivanting around beaches, and we need to go and see Mom.”

He sighed. “Your mother does not get the pleasures that other people might get from getting old. You’ll never find a bumper sticker on her car that says, ‘Happiness is being a grandparent’.”

“What about you, Papi? Will I find that bumper sticker on your car?”

George did not reply.

He moved on Maui time—he was six hours behind the rest of the world. It took him a long while to get ready and get out.

Lily was thinking of calling Spencer. What time was it in New York? Earlier? Still the middle of the night?

In the supermarket the torture began. “Why are you buying that?” George said when Lily took some cooked shrimp. “I already bought her smoked salmon.”

Lily replied that she knew that, but her mother sometimes liked cooked shrimp.

“Why are you buying iced tea? She doesn’t drink iced tea.”

“No, but I do, and maybe she would like some.”

“We don’t need soap. We have plenty of soap.”

“If we have plenty, then why did I find only a tiny little piece this morning?”

“You should have asked. We have plenty.”

“It’s only two bars of soap. I tell you what, I’ll take one with me, and the other you can throw out.”

“That’s the problem,” George said angrily. “We buy a lot of crap we don’t need and then end up throwing it all out.”

Traffic crawled along the coast. Driving north through the mountains to the hospital, Lily saw a beautiful tree with glorious bright red rhododendron-like flowers. She thought, I have to find out what it is before we go. I could paint that. She saw Maui in its grand drama, its youthfulness, its grand majestic beauty fresh from the fiery earth, and the tree stood like a symbol of its very creation.

Unlike the valor of the tree, there was no dignity in Allison’s ordeal. Her speech was garbled and spoken through gritted teeth, as if she were still drunk. Lily hoped it was the anesthetic drugs.

Dr. Aillard, he of the splendid bedside manner, came into the room and out of nowhere without so much as a hello, said to Allison, “You have to stop drinking, missy. And you have to start now. It’s time to face the music.”

Brilliant, thought Lily. Yes. Why didn’t my mother think of that?

Allison was looking at her bandaged and raised stump with disbelief. Lily too felt disbelief, like Grandma, last night, who had kept repeating, it can’t be, it can’t be, how could that happen, why amputation, wasn’t there something else they could do?

“It’s too late now, Grandma, to think of alternatives. She had poison gas inside her.”

“I know all about poison gas,” said Claudia. “Your mother avoided it narrowly when she was very young. Why did it have to be inevitable that it would catch up with her later in life, in America? It doesn’t seem fair.”

With the jaded doctor they couldn’t talk about the
foot.
Allison was staring numbly at where it was not. So they started to talk about the drinking. It wasn’t much easier.

She didn’t touch the food they brought her.

Another doctor, Dr. Matthews, came to say he would be taking care of Allison from now on, but George kept trying to tell him his whole life story, long, detailed explanations of Washington and
The Post
, and how there was an arm-breaking incident with Allison when he had been sleeping…Papi was tired, and didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t keep to the matter at hand, because the matter at hand was so large, and footless, he just didn’t know where to begin.

Matthews said Allison was going to go through DTs. He would keep an eye on them. He said morphine would help and that made Allison happy. Morphine! she exclaimed.

Matthews said she would be in the hospital for ten days, until “the stump” healed. He made them all cringe and didn’t even notice. He said he would corroborate that Allison’s injuries were inconsistent with physical abuse and try to get the DA to drop their charges. Lily nearly missed the meaning of his words because of the cringing. Then with relief she escaped from “the stump” to the telephone. Now all her mother had to do was retract her statement and her father would be off the hook.

Eventually, a police officer came in response to Lily’s persistent calls to the prosecutor’s office, and Allison said, “It was all my fault. I’m very sorry.”

Lily couldn’t believe those words. It had taken many calls to get the policeman to come and take a statement from Allison, and it was amazing to Lily that her efforts were not in vain. She had to argue with the police officer—Spencer would have been proud of her. Making Spencer proud of her was her goal in life. Everything from her real life, him—her sickness—suddenly seemed so remote when she was on the other side of the world. All she could think about were police statements and mandatory arrests. And gas gangrene. Perhaps if she stayed here, bought a house here, painted here—mangoes and sushi and palm trees—she would forget Spencer, forget she
was ever sick. She had money now, she could live anywhere she wanted, even by the ocean near the palm trees, away from him and from Amy and Andrew in their bed.