“How many credits are you short?” asked Allison.
“A few.”
“Wait till your father finds out.”
“Mom, you can’t still be threatening me with my father. I’m twenty-four.”
“Have you noticed by the way that your father isn’t here?”
Lily coughed. “I’ve noticed. Andrew told me he’s in D.C.”
Now Allison coughed. “Yes, whatever. He said he was going on freelance business. He said Andrew asked him for help in preparation for the fall campaign. It’s all lies. That’s all they both do, is lie.” Turning away, she got up and went away into her bedroom. When Lily knocked to ask if she was coming to the beach, Allison said she wasn’t feeling up to going.
The Mauian beach couldn’t help but erase some of the bad taste in Lily’s mouth. She imagined being here with Joshua, having money, a car, snorkeling, whale watching, biking at dawn to volcanoes, hiking in rainforests, swimming in water that in her great enthusiasm felt like liquid gold. It was enough to get her good and properly depressed about her own situation and to forget her mother and what more could one want from paradise, but to forget your mother’s troubles and remember your own?
Strangely, Hawaii was able to overcome even romantic disillusionments, for it looked and smelled and felt as if God were watching from up close. She had never seen water so green or the sky so blue, or the rhododendrons so red. She had never seen anyone happier than a guy who was swinging on a hammock in his backyard on the ocean and reading his book. Lily didn’t know how he could be reading. You couldn’t look away from that ocean. She was not hot, and when she walked into the water she was not cold. The water and the air were the same temperature. When she finished swimming and came out, she did not feel wet. She thought she could not get a suntan in weather that felt so mild, yet when she pulled away the strap of her bathing suit, she saw white underneath it, and next to it skin that was decidedly not white. That made her incredulous and happy and when she returned she was ready for rapprochement.
But in the darkened condo, Allison was still lying down, and Lily, not wanting to disturb her mother, went into her own room. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon.
She had a nap, and at six when she came out, her mother, her hair all done, and her make-up on, was ironing a skirt in the living room. “Come on, do you have anything nice to wear? Or do you want me to lend you something? I’ll take you to a wonderful oceanside cafe your father and I go to sometimes. It’s dressy, though, can’t go there in that little bikini you’re wearing.”
“I have a dress.”
“Well, let’s go. They have great lobster.”
All dressed and perfumed they went. Watching her mother walk in so elegant, so slim, so tall in her high-heeled shoes, smile at the host and be escorted on his arm to their beachside table, Lily thought that her father was right—when Allison was on, there was no woman in the room, regardless of age, more beautiful. Anne, Amanda, Lily, they inherited some of their mother’s remarkable physical traits, but parceled out, not in total, whereas their mother had all her remarkable physical traits to herself. The thick, wavy, auburn hair, the wide apart, slightly slanted gray eyes, the regal nose, the high cheekbones, the perfect mouth, elegant and slender like the rest of her. Amanda got the hair and the nose, Anne got the height and the cheekbones and the slimness. Anne got a lot. Lily got no height, no cheekbones, no hair, and no gray eyes. She got the slant of the eyes and a certain fluid grace of the mouth and the neck and the arms.
Before the water was poured, Allison said, “I’m not feeling well, Lil. This medicine I’m taking for my stomach is making me feel awful. I don’t know why I’m taking it.”
“Why are you?”
“Why, why. Because the doctor told me to, that’s why. I have a great problem with my stomach. You know how sick I am.”
Lily stared straight ahead. Ten years ago, Allison had an emergency operation for a perforated ulcer.
Ten years ago!
“You didn’t ask about Joshua, Mom.”
“How is that Joshua?”
“We broke up. Rather, he broke up with me.”
“He did? Why? I thought you got along so well.” She managed to inflect but just barely.
“Not really. I wasn’t a good enough listener for him, I think. All he wanted to do was talk about himself.”
“Ah, well. You’ll find somebody else. You’re still so young.” She sighed operatically. “Not like me. I’m so depressed, Lily.”
Of course you are. “Mom, how can you be depressed in a place like this? Look all around you.” Where depression was loss of color, Hawaii was color’s surfeit.
“Oh, what’s Hawaii to me? I’m so unhappy. Don’t you know you carry what’s inside you wherever you go?”
Lily supposed. For Hemingway, Paris was a moveable feast. For her grandmother it was Poland—one word synonymous with apocalypse and kielbasa. Lily’s mother’s moveable feast was misery.
Not this conversation again. “Why are you unhappy?” she said, trying to inflect, trying and failing, trying not to let lifelong impatience creep into her voice. “Why are you unhappy? You have a beautiful life. You don’t have to work. You don’t have to worry about money. You can travel, you can read, you can swim, fish, snorkel. You have all your faculties, plus a husband who loves you.”
Allison sighed again.
“Mom, Papi loves you.”
“Oh, Lily, you’re so naive.” She shook her head and looked into her food. “What is this love you talk about? Once, your father and I, true, we had love. But that was a long time ago.” Allison gnashed on her teeth. “Your father is very cruel. You don’t even know.”
Their lobster was brought. Lily tried to remember her first sixteen years of life with her mother and father. “Papi’s not cruel.” Papi was too passive to be cruel, she wanted to say.
“This is what I mean about naive! How can I even talk to you about this if you won’t listen to me.”
“I’m listening,” said Lily, but wished she weren’t. She kept picking at her lobster with a fork. Her mother stopped eating completely.
“Your father is very controlling, very unkind. And he doesn’t understand my depression, he doesn’t understand how unhappy I am, and worse, he doesn’t care. He is like you—he says, what do you have to be depressed about.”
“Mom,” Lily said quietly. “Answer me. Answer him. What do you have to be depressed about?”
Tears appeared in Allison’s eyes. “My whole life is a complete failure.”
“Why do you say this?” Lily wished she could be more outraged. She wanted to be outraged. If this were the first time she was hearing it, she might be. Soon her mother would wave off mention of the four children she had ably raised, of the six grandchildren she had, of the various happy lives of her offspring, of her son, the congressman! She would bring forth mention of a job she didn’t get when she became pregnant with Lily, as if that job would have been the panacea for the ills of the currently afflicted. She would bring forth Lily’s father, and how Allison’s whole life had revolved around him. “He was the tree under whose shadow we all fell.”
Did Allison just say that, or was the voice inside Lily’s head so frigging loud?
She looked up at her mother, who nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s true, you, too, Lily, you, too, were under his shadow. Under his and Andrew’s. I don’t know why you girls love Andrew so much, he was never there for you. Especially for you. He would take you out once a month to the movies, and you thought he was a gift from God, why? I would spend all day, every day with you, parks, bike rides, ice skating, movies, book stores, and I never got you to look at me with a hundredth of the affection you looked at him. And you ask me why I’m bitter.”
“I didn’t ask,” Lily said.
“My son—is he all right, by the way? Now that his father is not here, he stopped calling.”
“He doesn’t call anybody.”
“What’s your excuse? Or your sis
ters’? None of you ever call me. Amanda has more kids than anybody and she calls me the most, and that’s hardly ever. Just you wait, wait till you’re my age. I hope God will give you daughters as ungrateful as yourself.”
To say Lily wished she were anywhere but here would have been like saying she preferred to sleep in a comfortable bed rather than on a bed of rusty nails.
“Mom,” she said, “you could be in New York, seeing us every week. But you moved to Hawaii. What do you want?”
“To die,” said Allison. “Sometimes that’s all I want, relief from the blackness.” She took Lily’s hand. “Daughter, I think of killing myself sometimes, but I’m too afraid of God. I think of killing myself every day.”
Lily took her hand away. Did this, or did this not, count as psychological abuse? “I can’t believe you’re telling me this.”
“Daughters are supposed to be friends to their mothers in their old age.”
“I think they’re supposed to be daughters first. I can’t believe you’re telling me you want to die. Do you understand how wrong that is?” If only it had been the first time she were hearing it. But she had a vivid memory of being thirteen years old when her mother took her into the bedroom and told her calmly that she only had three months to live. Still, every time Lily heard it, it sounded like the first time. It felt like the first time.
“I’m not telling you to upset you. I’m telling you so you can be prepared. So you know that it wasn’t out of the blue. Your father, if he was a different man, maybe my life would be different. If only he understood me, sympathized with me.”
“Ma, Papi put food on our table for over forty years. Fed us, clothed us, paid for our college.”
“Could barely afford City College for you,” said Allison. “Didn’t have anything left for you.”
“City College is fine,” said Lily.
“And you’re repaying his kindness by refusing to graduate. You know we can’t afford to keep you. We pay for your apartment and for your grandmother’s house, and taxes and maintenance for this condo. We’re completely broke because we’re keeping three different homes.”
“I’ll get more hours at Noho Star. I’ll be fine.”
“Yes, but your grandmother, what about her? She’s not going anywhere, is she?”
“Guess not. Guess your mother is not going anywhere.”
Allison said nothing, but busied herself in pretending to pull out pieces of her lobster. “I can’t believe you haven’t graduated. Six years completely down the toilet. Six years of college so you can wash dishes at a diner. Well, I hope you’re a good dishwasher. Certainly you’ve had enough education to be the very best.”
Lily did not eat one more bite of her lobster. What had Andrew said, she should go to Maui and soothe their mother? Had anyone in the history of the universe ever had such a dumb idea? She was the exact wrong person for that sort of thing. Lily couldn’t soothe her mother into a massage.
And the next afternoon when she knocked on her mother’s door to ask her to come to the beach, Allison was lying down. “I’ve been to the beach. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“You haven’t been to the beach with me. Come.”
“Leave me alone, will you?” said Allison. “You’re just like your father. Stop forcing me into your pointless regimens.”
Lily went alone. How could she manage even another day?
But it’s Hawaii, Hawaii! The rainforests, the volcanoes. What would she prefer, yesterday’s dinner conversation, or the beach by herself? The choice was so clear.
And so it was the beach by herself, and lunch, and walks through the palms, and the sunsets, and the community pool at the condo.
Days went by. Concentration drained out of Lily. She was unable to focus long enough to sketch. She kept rendering the same palms over and over. Charcoal was an insult to Hawaii, watercolors did not do justice to Hawaii, and oil paints she did not have, nor a canvas for them. All she had was her charcoal pencils and her sketchbook, and there was nothing to draw in Maui with charcoal except the inside of her mother’s colorless apartment and the numbers 1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49.
Andrew had not called to tell her how it was going with Papi. Amy had not called. She had not heard from Joshua.
For hours during the day, Lily busied her mind with being blighted with the lottery ticket. Cursed.
Simply, this is what she believed: she believed that the universe showed each of us certain things, that it made certain things open.
Many people lived a peaceful life with nothing ever happening to them. But into some families other things fell. Some families were afflicted with random tragedies—car accidents, plane accidents, hang gliding accidents, bus crashes, knifings, drownings, scarves getting caught under the wheels of their Rolls Royces, breaking their necks. The lovely girl in the prom dress standing in the dance hall and suddenly a titanium steel pipe from above breaking, falling on her, impaling her through the skull on her prom night! The valedictorian high school graduate headed to Cornell, standing on the street corner in New York City, suddenly finding himself in the middle of a robbery. A stray bullet—the only bullet fired—hitting him, killing him. Lily was not worried about old age or hereditary illness, she was worried about portholes of the universe opening up and demons swallowing her.
Lily believed that the portholes that allowed random tragedy to fall in were also the portholes that allowed lottery tickets to fall in. Out of control SUVs at state fairs. A sunspot in your eye, and wham, your child is dead. Plane crashes, ten-car collisions, freak lightning storms, fatal infections from a harmless day at the farm, and 1, 18, 24, 39, 45, 49. All from the same place. All leading to the same place—destruction.
And Lily Quinn prided herself all her life on being exactly the kind of girl who’d never won a single thing. Her karma had been being not just an un-winner, but the anti-winner. In fact, she could be sure that if she picked it, it would never win. She couldn’t win so much as a pack of cigarettes on a free tour of the Philip Morris tobacco factory in North Carolina. She couldn’t win a no-homework weekend when there were only ten entrants and the professor picked three names. She didn’t win the short or the long straw. She didn’t get to lose and clean the toilet, or come up to the headmaster and ask for more gruel, any more than she got to win a prize at a baby shower contest. She played a game at her sister’s shower called, “How well do you know your sister?”—and came in third!
49—for the year her mother and grandmother came to America.
45—for the year of the end of the war that changed the world.
39—for its beginning.
24—for her age. Last year Lily played 23.
18—Because it was her favorite number.
1—because it was the loneliest number.
She bought herself a lottery ticket every single week for six years, playing the numbers that meant something to her not because she had hope, but because she wanted to reaffirm the order of her quiet universe. Because she truly believed that the Force that let her numbers never be pulled out of a hat at Saturday night’s drawing was the same Force that did not place the titanium rod at her two feet of life.
Unable to draw or read or focus, Lily concentrated all her efforts on getting a tan. In a secluded part of a small semi-circle of the local beach near Wailea, Lily took off her bikini halter and sunbathed topless, getting a very thorough tan indeed. After almost three weeks her breasts looked positively Brazilian and even her nipples got dark brown.
In the first week of June, Lily was sitting outside on the patio, home from the beach, thinking about what to do for the rest of her day—for the day was so loooong—when the phone rang. The phone never rang! Lily was so excited, she nearly knocked over a chair getting to it.
“Hello?” she said in an eager-lover voice.
“Lilianne Quinn?” said an unfamiliar man’s baritone on the other end.
“Yes?” she said, much more subdued, in a voice unfamiliar to herself.
“This is Detective O’Malley of the NYPD. I’m calling about your roommate, Amy McFadden.”
Excitement was instantly supplanted by something else—worry. “Yes? What’s happened?” From his tone, Lily thought Amy might have been in a car accident.
“Have you heard from her?”
“No.” She paused. “I’m here in Hawaii.”
“Well, I know,” said the detective. “I’m calling you there, aren’t I?”
That was true. “What’s happened?”
“She seems to have disappeared.”
“Oh.” Lily immediately calmed down. “Hmm. Have you checked with her mother?”
“Her mother is the one who reported her missing, which is why I’m calling you. According to Jan McFadden, Amy hasn’t called home in three weeks. Their repeated attempts to reach her at the apartment have failed. Do you recall the last time you saw her?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said, deflecting. “I’d have to think about it.”
There was silence on the other end. “Are you thinking about it now?”
“Detective, I don’t know. I’ve been here three weeks. I guess I saw her right before I left.”
“When was that?”
“I…I can’t remember now.” Dates had been singed out of her head by the Tropic of Cancer sun. “Can I think about it and call you back?”
“Yes—but quickly.”
“Or…” Something occurred to Lily. “Do you think I should come back? Is this something you need to speak to me about in person?”
“I’m not sure. Is it?”
“Yes, yes, I think I should come back. I’ll be able to give you much more detail.”
“Well, I appreciate that, Miss Quinn. This seems quite serious.”
Lily didn’t think so, but then this detective didn’t know Amy.
“You need me to come back right away? The sooner the better?”
“Well—”
“Of course. This is an emergency. I’ll be glad to be of any help. I’ll fly back tonight. Is that soon enough?”