14
Riding Shotgun
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
Spencer’s Twelve Tickets
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 th
at 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 sai
d, 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.”