The Girl in Times Square (50 page)
“I don’t understand.”
“But I myself am going now. I suggest you go, too.”
Andrew looked up at Spencer. “Justice is at hand?”
And taking out his recorder, Spencer pulled out the tape and handed it to Andrew. “Not from me,” he said. “Mercy from me. Because of Lily. Now do you understand?”
The Other Side
The superintendent said later he first thought it was a mischief of dead rats. For weeks the hallway had been smelling increasingly fetid. Finally he opened one of the fireproof steel doors leading to a small storage room, gasped and started retching even as he was running down the corridor. He had to stop and vomit before he could continue up to the street level to call the police. The stench was awful, he told them, almost like a roomtemperature morgue full of bodies. The police with gas masks on discovered it was just one decomposing body. The smell of wretchedness and nihilist zeal in high relief was the same odor that still clung to Lily’s apartment, even weeks after Milo had absconded with her (and himself, and Amy, and Andrew). He must have regained consciousness just long enough to crawl away into a closet to die and rot in darkness, and his flesh began to fall off his bones. No one even knew he had been long dead and gone. The rats had gnawed on what was left of him.
Two police cars, three ambulances, and a fire truck were pulled to a stop on the Palisades Parkway north of George Washington bridge on the way to Bear Mountain. Part of the highway had been sealed off to traffic. Spencer parked his car at a sharp, expedient angle and he and Gabe made their careful way down
the near vertical cliff to the Hudson River below. They stopped about twenty paces from the wreck that had just been pulled out of the water. He and Gabe slowly walked to the car, their eyes adjusting to the night, trying to discern what shape the car was in, and who was in it.
Spencer had a lot of experience with wrecks, after spending years patrolling the Long Island Expressway on Saturday nights. Within a few feet of the car he could usually tell not only what shape the passengers were going to be in, but also what injuries they were going to have. Gabe, never out of grid-locked New York City, was green in this area and was going to be of no help, self-evident by his stunned whistle and, “Oh, shit.”
Spencer shushed him. When he got ten paces from the car, he realized things were going to be pretty bad. It was a blue sports car, a Mercedes 500SL convertible. He hated convertibles. He wished he could explain the laws of physics to every idiot who thought it was so cool to drive a convertible at night on the highway at ninety miles an hour. This convertible he thought had been going faster than ninety. This one seemed as if it had been going at a hundred-and-ninety when it met the immovable force of the concrete divider, careened once, twice; spun once, twice, flipped over, screeched to a sliding stop on its convertible hood, and then went over the cliff into the water below. The car was now unrecognizable as something that once had metal around leather seats, perhaps a dashboard and a windshield. Though the windshield could protect the driver from wind, it wasn’t as good at protecting him from physics. Invariably it was almost always a him. Women tended to drive tanklike Volvos and to drive their Volvos slower, as if they still remembered the kids they had left back home even when the glorious night wind was whipping through their hair.
Spencer and Gabe stood silently by the wreck trying to process what they were seeing. Even the inexperienced Gabe might be able to point out the thing about the convertible that didn’t make sense.
“Hey,” said Gabe. “There’s no driver in it.”
“Shh. Don’t say anything.”
“You think there were passengers?”
“Gabe! This is not a remote-control car. Of course there were passengers.”
It was a two-seater car. And it was empty. “Well, where are they?”
Spencer looked around. It was so dark, with only the police flares and floodlights illuminating the wreck, and up above, over the cliffs, the occasional light whiz of passing cars at midnight. But whether it was dark or daylight, one thing was clear—there was no driver.
There was no driver in the car, and the car was demolished.
“Why did you bring me here?” said Gabe. “Why are we looking at a car accident in New Jersey at midnight? I can’t even believe that sentence is coming out of my mouth! Why us? Why me at midnight?”
And Spencer replied. “Because, McGill, Mr. Homicide Detective, this is Andrew Quinn’s car.”
Andrew was not found.
“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.
