The Girl in Times Square (48 page)

Lily is trying to form a word on her lips. The doctor is adjusting her respirator mask. She is laboriously breathing. DiAngelo lets her breathe without the oxygen for a few minutes every hour, to see how she does. And this time before he reattaches it, she forms and forms the word she wants the doctor to hear. The only word she wants to see in front of her.

“Spencer…” whispers Lily.

And he comes. He is sitting by her. She can tell that every time she takes a wheezing breath, it twists his heart, but he sits calmly despite it. Only his mouth is twisted.

“Spencer?”

“Yes, Liliput.”

“You know what I think? About Amy?”

“What do you think?”

“I think she may have gone away to be rid of both of them.”

“You think so?” he said quietly.

“I think she just had enough, you know? And she didn’t know how to solve it. How to end it. She didn’t know how to spare Andrew. How to get herself away from Milo; he was so dependent on her, especially after everything that happened. Amy didn’t want to be part of Milo. She didn’t want to hurt my brother. I think she loved him. You look skeptical, but I truly believe it.
And I think she went away to save him, because she didn’t know another way. I think she disappeared the same way Hobbit disappeared. A new identity for Amy somewhere around the bend of the Mississippi, a new life without them both. But maybe, in this new life, she is still waiting for him. Waiting for my brother to come to her. She came to him with malice in her heart, and she didn’t expect love, it was the last thing she expected. And maybe she’s waiting for him somewhere, to tell him this.”

Spencer stayed silent.

“What do you think?”

He squeezed her carefully. “Maybe you’re right.” Then he was silent again.

“Remember Oliver and Jenny?” Lily asked.

“Yes.”

“Who do you feel more sorry for? Him, sitting by the ice skating rink, or her?”

“Her, Harlequin,” said Spencer. “I feel only for her.”

She held his hand. “And I feel only for him,” she whispered.

Spencer was watching her, and then bending so that she felt his lips graze against her cheek, he sang in a low cracked voice: “
Tomorrow my love and I/Will sleep ’neath auburn skies/Somewhere across the border/We’ll leave behind my dear/The pain and sadness we found here/And we’ll drink from the Bravo’s muddy waters/Where the sky grows gray and white/We’ll meet on the other side/There across the border
…”

“Bruce is not just for lovemaking anymore?” Lily whispered.

“He is for all seasons,” replied Spencer, his forehead pressed to her cheek. “Like you.”

DiAngelo had to give Lily massive transfusions to get her counts up and then pump her full of chemicals to empty her marrow completely.

In a hospital room, DiAngelo took healthy bone marrow from the hip of an anesthetized Allison Quinn, who matched five for
six of her daughter’s genetic markers. He harvested almost four pints of soupy, healthy matching marrow, leaving Allison with weakness and heavy bruising where the needle had repeatedly gone in. Then he injected the thick liquid into Lily’s central venous line, right where she lay, without even an anesthetic.

And they waited. Would her body reject it? Would her body accept it? Would it start to regenerate again, like a starfish?

Her vital powers began to pool at her feet, the blood was coursing slower and slower, molasses-like, the saline in her body fluids depleted, the heart slowing down, pumping forty difficult beats a minute, pushing the molasses through her body.

Thirty…

Twenty…

Nineteen…

Eighteen…

Seventeen…

Fifteen…

Ten…

They gave her electric shock at ten.

Twenty…

Fifteen…

Code blue. Code blue. Electric shock.

Seven…

Six…

Another electric shock.

Five.

Four…

Five…

Six…

Four…one beat every fifteen seconds.

One beat every twenty seconds.

One beat every thirty seconds.

One beat.

I didn’t paint enough, I didn’t dance enough, I didn’t love enough.

Spencer!

Life lived as exclamation, instead of desperation.

She thought she heard someone singing, someone close by, nearby, whose voice was so familiar and so beloved and so desperately desired. Lily thought that she had opened her eyes, and on her bed, by her side, holding her hands sat her mother. Her mother, dressed and coiffed and made up and sober. She sat and her eyes glistened, but she looked strong and beautiful like she did when she was young, and she was smiling. “Shh, shh,” she said. “Shh, shh. Liliput, my baby girl, my baby, my child, my daughter, everything is going to be all right now. Everything is going to be all right.”

Lily smiled, and with her eyes closed, she heard her mother singing a song from long ago, from deep comfort, from childhood.

…
When you wake, you shall have All the Pretty Little Horses
…

“We can’t stabilize her,” DiAngelo said. He said this to both the mother and father in the waiting room, though he was having trouble looking at the father, afraid that his pitying gaze might betray him. Waiting with the parents sat Anne, Grandma, and Amanda. And in the corner by himself, as far away as it was possible to be and still be in the same room, was Spencer. Andrew was not there. DiAngelo thought it was to Spencer’s credit that he was not afraid of the family’s contempt, though Spencer looked right now like nothing was to his credit.

Anne stepped up. DiAngelo tensed. “What’s happening to her right now?”

“Every hour or so she keeps going into cardiac arrest. Her pulse dropped below twenty. We keep resuscitating her. She is on oxygen, on IV fluids, antibiotics. Her body seems to be doing okay with the new marrow, we just can’t get her organs to normalize, so no new platelets or white cells are being made. She keeps needing transfusions every four hours. Her liver function is down, her lungs aren’t working on their own, her heart is not beating on its own. Dialysis, transfusions, electric shock, that’s how she’s being stabilized.”

“Sounds to me it’s how she’s being destabilized,” said Anne.

It would to you, wouldn’t it, DiAngelo thought.

Allison Quinn was in front of him, listening with clenched hands. DiAngelo thought it was brave of her to stand. He could tell she had once been a beautiful woman, she still was if you didn’t look at what she had done to damage herself on the outside, too—the prematurely-aged skin, the puffy bloodshot eyes, the swollen face. Taking two quarts of her marrow had sapped her—she looked frail and depleted. “So what do you think we should do, doctor?” she asked.

“We’ll keep doing what we’re doing. I’m just giving you a heads up.”

“What’s her prognosis?” Allison clutched George’s arm.

DiAngelo glanced at Spencer, off in the corner. “Bleak,” he replied.

Anne patted him (!) gently. “You’ve done all you can, doctor. Really, no one could have done more. She’s been comatose now for over two weeks.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think she’s suffered enough?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think she has. I think she can suffer a little more.”

Anne sighed. Allison frowned. Claudia rolled her eyes. Amanda put her arm around her grandmother and stayed out of it. George,
as always
, stayed out of it.

DiAngelo said tightly, “I will keep you apprised of her progress.”

“There isn’t going to be any progress! Two weeks in a coma! She’s a vegetable, we don’t know if she has any brain function left.”

But DiAngelo was ready, no, not just ready—itching for a fight. “She has brain function left. She had a brain CT yesterday. She’s holding up.”

“Her heart would stop if
you
would stop those infernal electric shocks!”

“Would is a subjunctive case, Mrs. Ramen. Are you implying that you would like your sister’s heart to stop?”

“I would like her to have some peace, for God’s sake!”

The mother and the father tried to shh shh her—for comfort, not quiet.

“She’ll have peace enough when she’s dead,” DiAngelo said.

“If you leave her be, she’d have peace, wouldn’t she?”

“Once again, Mrs. Ramen, what are you implying?”

“I’m
saying
, not implying, that we’ve had a year of this, a year! A year of her body being done, a year of you fighting off the inevitable, and the only one, the
only
one who benefits from his ungodly mess is you! Her family has been grieving for months, she has been suffering for months, fighting a losing fight.”

DiAngelo looked through Lily’s chart. “Right here,” he said, pulling out a standard hospital form. “Very clearly says keep alive by any means necessary. Signed by Lily Quinn. Who is not a minor and was of sound mind when she put her John Hancock to it.”

Anne stepped closer to the doctor. She grabbed the sheet out of his hands, and before he could make a motion, ripped it into tiny pieces and threw it in his face. “That’s what I think of your fucking form,” she said. “You should have told us in the beginning this was a fatal cancer. I’ve read up on it—nobody makes it out alive. The bone marrow is the last straw, and she has fallen into a coma even before the transplant. Her body has given up. I’ll go to court if I need to, with the full support of my family to give her what she needs.”

“Death is what she needs?”

“To stop suffering is what she needs! Why are you the only one who can’t see it?”

“All right, Annie, now, all right,” said Allison. “Calm down.”

“Ma, you tell him. You are her mother. She doesn’t have a husband to administer her health. Tell him you don’t want her kept artificially alive, tell him you want her to have peace, to stop suffering. Tell him, Ma.”

“Why did I come seven thousand miles to give my marrow if we’re just going to remove her respirator?” Allison said huffily.

Spencer, stepping up at last, said to Anne, “Mrs. Ramen, this
is not about making her family more comfortable in their grieving process. This is about Lily. She wanted to be kept alive. She will be kept alive.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” said Anne. “No one asked you. No one is speaking to you. I can’t believe you have the nerve to be here.”

“I have the nerve to be many places where I’m not wanted.”

“You’re wanted here by Lily,” said DiAngelo. “You are the first person she asks for when she wakes up.”

“Well, he should have the decency to wait somewhere else,” piped up Amanda, letting her feelings for Spencer be known. Claudia kept quiet with a lowered head.

“He has every right to wait here,” said DiAngelo. “And you need to stop bickering. Why are you here, Mrs. Ramen? Why don’t you go home yourself, where
you’ll
be more comfortable?”

“I’m not going anywhere till my sister gets what she deserves.”

“Your sister stipulated no DNR. Go spend your money suing the hospital to stop the resuscitation. You’ll be broke long before we are.”

“Well, of course—you’re making millions of dollars on my sister.”

“To keep her alive.”

“Millions of dollars!” screamed Anne. “Of her money, when you know she’s got no chance, no chance in the world. She is going to lie here for twelve years on your fucking dialysis, while you’ll be collecting on your golf course, sitting sipping champagne in your country club, paying for your Bronxville mansion with her money. I will sue you, you bastard, and I will win…”

“Anne, you won’t win, now stop this. It’s your sister, for God’s sake.” That was George, leaning towards Anne, but he glanced at DiAngelo as if begging him to stop.

DiAngelo turned to go, but then, as if in afterthought, turned around and said, “It just occurs to me, Mrs. Ramen, that I forgot to mention something here that might be of some help.” DiAngelo stared at Spencer, who stood behind the family, vehemently shaking his head. But the good doctor would not be stopped. “Your concern for your sister is admirable, and you’re so close to her, I’m sure you must know that if she dies—if that heart you want stopped is stopped—all her remaining money goes to Detective O’Malley.”

The stunned silence in the waiting room was worth it.

“That can’t be true,” said Anne tonelessly.

“No? Turns out she did make a living will, Mrs. Ramen. And she left Detective O’Malley everything. Isn’t that so, Detective O’Malley?” DiAngelo asked in an off-hand voice.

“Hmm,” said Spencer, shaking his head at DiAngelo.

“Ah, yes. There you have it.” DiAngelo took a step toward the ICU’s double doors. “If we DNR her,
he
, whom you hate, gets all her money. The ironies just pile up. But perhaps to ease her suffering, it’ll be worth it? Well, good day now. I’ll be out to talk to you again after my evening rounds.”

DiAngelo made his exit and an incredulous Spencer inched away to his seat in the corner. On second thought he decided to go out for a proverbial smoke. This was a very good time to start smoking. Either that or…

A voice called after him. Anne.

He reluctantly turned around.

Her voice was shaking, her hands were shaking. She was shaking all over. “You bastard. It’s not enough that you managed to ruin my brother’s life, you’ve taken from us the easing of our financial burdens?”

The language of tragedy! Spencer thought, as Anne closed in on him, quaking, talking. “You think you’ll be able to keep that money? You and she are not married, you are not living together, you have absolutely no right to that money.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” he said tiredly.

“You will spend the rest of your natural life in court,” said Anne. “I will fight you, you crook, until I’m unable to stand. I will get that fucking money from you if it’s the last thing I do.”

Spencer gritted his own teeth and into Anne’s livid face said, “No use threatening me. Your sister is not dead—” He didn’t know how he kept himself from saying the word
yet.
He had to leave the room immediately and go outside to clear his head. He walked from 66th Street across Central Park to Wollman’s Rink and in the humid September sat high in the blue bleachers looking below at the empty-of-ice rink. He took off his jacket. It was hot.

Lily, he prayed. I lost my pregnant wife at 23, and I didn’t think I would ever recover. Perhaps in some ways I never have. In my thirties I met and fell in love with another girl, and she too died, murdered at barely 21. And now there is you. I seem to be so unlucky for all my women. Please. Don’t die and leave me, too, Lily.

He sat there a long time. He thought of going back; perhaps there was some news. But DiAngelo knew his beeper number. He would have called.

His cell phone rang. Instantly he picked it up.

“O’Malley!” It was Gabe. “Get your ass over to the
reservoir
right now. You won’t fucking believe this. We found her.”

For a moment Spencer didn’t know what Gabe was talking about.

“Stop being so Irish-dense, O’Malley! A dog owner running with his dog-pound mutt called in, says the pooch uncovered something that looks suspiciously like human bones. I’m betting my month’s salary it’s your McFadden girl. Go there
stat.
87th Street on the West Side, off the bridle path.”