Lily was smooth and chocolate bronzed and young, her little spaghetti strap tank top, her short, short denim skirt. Fleetingly he imagined her lying on the white sand in Maui, all moist and hot from the sun, eyes closed, on her back, browning, burning, topless.
Spencer needed to pour the drink back into the bottle. He never drank on the days he worked, because Spencer knew that his mind played tricks on him when it told him he could do it, could have just one, when it intellectualized and rationalized the glass in his hands. He imagined bringing the whisky to his mouth and downing it in three deep swallows. No dainty swilling, smelling, sipping of the blended malt for him in a quaint dram.
If life had taught Spencer Patrick O’Malley anything it was that the missing never just showed up, and there was no such thing as having just one.
6
Conversations with Mothers
“Detective O’Malley…” Lily wished she could ask him to stop, tell him to stop coming to the diner. He’d been to see her five times in ten days. “People are starting to talk,” was all she said.
“Really? What are they saying?”
Lily shook her head. “What can I do for you today? Can I get you a cup of coffee? A donut?”
“Very stereotypical of you, Miss Quinn. No, thank you to both. I am not a donut person. Have you spoken to Amy’s mother?”
“No, not yet.”
“You should call her. She would like to hear from you. I think it will be good for her to hear from you. She’s always just this side of hysteria. She calls me four times a day. And I’ve got no leads besides you.”
“I’m not a lead,” said Lily, taken aback, but then saw he was half-joking. “Detective,” she said, almost pleadingly. “I’ll call her, and I’m going to tell her what I’ve told you. I think she’s worried for nothing. I think Amy just left for a while and will soon turn up safely and everything will be all right. My hunch is that Amy went with whoever she was seeing on vacation.”
“Oh, so a minute ago you didn’t think she was seeing anyone at all, and now you think she’s eloped?”
Lily squeezed her hands together. She could not do this anymore, she had to go back to work, she had other customers!
During her silence, Spencer said, “And do you think Amy would leave on vacation for four weeks without telling anyone and miss her graduation, to which she invited her whole family? Is she that unthinking, that inconsiderate? Wouldn’t she realize her parents would be worried sick about her?”
“Not unthinking, not inconsiderate, just in love, detective. You know? We forgive people who are in love for their short-term inconsideration. It’s such bad form to deny them.”
“So a minute ago, no boyfriend whatsoever and now so wildly in love, you’re defending her on grounds of temporary insanity? Please, pick a side of the fence, Miss Quinn, and keep to it.” He tipped his proverbial hat as he left.
Judi came over and whispered, “Ooooooh,” from behind.
“Just stop it,” said Lily.
Why wasn’t she able to call Amy’s mother? Why couldn’t she make that call? On the surface it seemed so easy, as easy as talking to the detective. Easier—she knew her, she liked her. Hi, Mrs. McFadden, how are you, and the other children…ugh, right there. The other children? Yes, Mrs. McFadden, I know it’s terrible about Amy. She’s gone and no one knows where she is, but the other children that you still have, how are they? Are they safe? That was the whole problem. Imagining the conversation filled Lily with such itching discomfort that she just couldn’t bring herself to pick up the phone.
She called her grandmother instead.
“Have you been reading the papers?” said Claudia. “An Amtrak train struck a log truck at a crossing this morning, derailing all ten cars and injuring ten people. Two people were seriously hurt.”
“Grandma…”
“A microphone stand impaled a pregnant mother, who fell in her own house while getting her two boys ready for school. She fell from the second floor to the first and was impaled through the chest on her microphone stand. She was a musician.”
“Grandma, please!”
“Think about those boys. It’s terrible seeing your own mother get hurt in such a freak accident.”
“Yes. Yes, it must be. Well, thanks for talking. I gotta run.”
Andrew hadn’t called Lily since she got back. She had called him at home last week, but Miera said he was in Washington. “Lily, his schedule is posted online. Clearly says, Washington. Call him there.”
She called him there, but he was still in session. And he didn’t return her call. Typical of him. He would get so busy, sometimes she didn’t hear from him for weeks. She called Andrew’s apartment to speak to her father, but there was no answer. She walked around her bare room, looked at her watercolors, her photographs, her words, pictures of herself as a child, held by her sister Amanda, hugged by her brother—their youngest, Lilianne, good girl, dark girl, smart girl, walking early, smiling early, clever, funny, holding up a picture of a perfect lotus flower she drew when she was three, laughing at her mother, who took the photo. Suddenly Lily stopped walking, her gaze darkened, her eyes blinked, blinked again, closed.
Spencer who saw everything. Could he have looked at her walls and missed the lottery ticket? It was small and tucked in, part of a collage, covered by a photo on one side, and old American Ballet Company tickets on the other, but could he have seen? She came closer to the ticket. Oh, so what if he did? He didn’t know by heart the drawing from that day, April 18, 1999.
When the phone rang, she absent-mindedly picked it up.
“Lil?” It was her mother! That caught Lily unawares. Had she been caught awares, she never would have picked up the phone. The modern conveniences of caller ID—call screening. Maybe if she cashed in her lottery ticket, she could afford the six extra bucks for caller ID-while-call-waiting; that would be most useful. Ha! This she was thinking while trying to decipher the tone of her mother’s voice which seemed rather chipper for a woman who had found herself recently and unexpectedly without a husband.
Suddenly her father picked up the other extension. “Lil?”
“Papi?”
“Yes, why so shocked? I do live here, you know.” And he laughed.
Her mother said, “I barely spoke five seconds to my own child. Could I have her first, and then you’ll have her when I’m done?”
“Mom, let me speak to Papi quick now.”
As soon as Allison slammed down the phone, George said, “Yes, honey?” in his most casual, most unconcerned, most I’m-in-Hawaii-and-I’m-so-happy voice.
“I don’t understand. I thought you were staying with Andrew?”
“Oh, I was in D.C. on a little business. That’s all. Not a big deal.”
“So you’re…back?”
“Everything is fine, great even. I was getting the jitters, you know, having worked non stop for forty-five years. Well, you wouldn’t know. But someday you’ll work.”
“I work now. Fifty hours a week. Papi, what’s going on? Talk to me.”
“Nothing to talk about. Do you know your mother has been coming to the beach with me every single morning? She loves it. She wasn’t feeling well when you were here. She is much better now. And she is cutting down on her smoking. She is looking beautiful, by the way, your mother.”
Allison came back on the line, and both she and George were on the phone now, clucking, joking, chuckling. “Lily, this is like a second honeymoon with your father,” her mother whispered. “I can’t tell you how happy we are.”
Could Lily hang up fast enough? She didn’t think so.
Now she had the strength to call Amy’s mother!
The voice on the other line was groggy and slightly slurred.
“Oh, Lily,” said Mrs. McFadden. “Where is she? Where is Amy? Why haven’t we heard from her?”
Lily wanted to say a few hollow words, and did, petering off, trailing off, she wanted to say more, about how she wasn’t worried—which was les
s and less true—and about how Amy liked to be independent and she hated accounting to anyone for her actions. (“That’s so true,” said Amy’s mother.) She said that she would call as soon as Amy came back, but she said it feebly, and it didn’t matter anyway, it wasn’t heard over Mrs. McFadden’s crying. There was no getting through to the mother, just as Lily had suspected, and she didn’t have anything in her arsenal with which to get through. Maybe Amanda would know how. After all, she had four children. Maybe if one of them went missing she would know what to say to Mrs. McFadden, who had had Amy with her first husband and was now remarried with two brand new children. She must have thought she was so close to not having to worry about Amy anymore.
Jan continued to cry, and Lily continued to sit on the phone and not know what to say except an intermittent and impotent, “I’m really sorry.”
Paul and Rachel, who were Amy’s friends and whose nucleus was Amy, wanted to talk only about—Amy. The conversation with Paul inevitably went something like this:
“Lil, where do you think she is?”
“I don’t know. What about you?”
“Have no idea. But then I didn’t live with her, I don’t know her everyday habits.”
“Paul, I might know how many times a day Amy brushes her teeth but I don’t know where she’s gone to.”
“I understand. No one is blaming you, Lil. Why so defensive?”
“Because everybody seems to think I have answers that I just don’t have. You don’t know how often that detective asks me where she is.”
“Where do you think she is?”
“I don’t know!”
“Do you think something happened to her?”
“No! Like what?”
And with Rachel:
“God, Lil, what do you think happened to Amy?”
“I don’t know. What about you?”
“I have no idea. But then, I didn’t live with her.”
Lily formulated her doubts. “Rach, the detective told me you told him that Amy was definitely seeing somebody.”
“That’s what she told me. Don’t you know? I thought you’d confirm for sure. Who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“She didn’t tell me, Rachel.”
“Why would she keep something like that from you? I thought you were close.”
“We were close. We are close.”
“By the way…is the detective married?”
“I don’t know. Why would I know that? And what do you care? How is TO-nee?”
“Tony is great,” Rachel said cryptically. “Never better.”
“So what are you asking about the detective for then?”
“No reason.”
Lily fell back on Amy’s bed. Did she have the answers? Should she have the answers? That was even worse. Should she and just doesn’t because Lily Quinn doesn’t have the answers to anything? Not to why she hasn’t graduated in six years, not to what she wants to do with her life, not to what’s wrong with her mother, not to just what it is that Joshua can’t love about her, not to where Amy is. Not to 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
MISSING: Amy McFadden
DESCRIPTION:
Sex: Female
Race: Caucasian
Age: 24
Height: 5′8″
Weight: 140 lbs.
Build: Medium
Complexion: Fair
Hair: Red, long, curly
Eyes: Brown
Clothing/Jewelry: Unknown.
Last seen: May, 1999, in the vicinity of Avenue C and 9th Street in Manhattan, New York, within the confines of the 9th Precinct.
Lily and Rachel and Paul walked around the neighborhood and tacked the 81/2 by 11 posters with Amy’s photo on the lamp posts of every block from 12th Street down to 4th and on three avenues, A, B, and C. Lily couldn’t help but be reminded of thumbtacking her lottery ticket to her wall, and every time she thought of it she felt stabbed a little in the chest, and walked on to the next lamp post without raising her head, careful not to look at her friends, nor at the homeless on the stoops who gazed at them from underneath their rags. Paul tied shiny yellow ribbons above the posters. Amy missing. 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1. Amy missing. 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
7
Birds of Paradise
Allison showed up for their new conjugal bliss of a honeymoon three days straight. She went to the beach with him gladly the first day, reluctantly the second day, and on the third morning with hostility, complaining about the wetness of the water, and the sandiness of the sand, and the sunniness of the sun, and the steepness of the hill, complaining about his shoes, which as far as he could see weren’t bothering her. Complaining about the omelet he had yet to make (“I’m sick of your omelets.”) and the coffee (“You never make enough.”).
The fourth morning she didn’t get out of bed, telling him in a mumbled voice that she had had a late night and needed to sleep. The fifth morning, she said she wasn’t feeling well. Her legs hurt from all the walking. She was developing corns and calluses on her feet. She was getting a chill from the cold (??? 79°F!) water so early in the morning. Her bathing suit was dirty and needed to be washed. The towels weren’t dry and she wasn’t going without the towels.
“Allie, want to go to the beach?”
“No. How many beaches can we go to? I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen a volcanic beach?”
She paused. “Sand and water, right?”
“No, volcanic pebbles.”
“You want me to walk barefoot on rocks? Don’t you remember how I cut my foot?”
“Allie, let’s go, for an hour.”
“I’m not going. I have to put the towels in the dryer, they’ll smell if I don’t. Why don’t you go?”
“I don’t want to go by myself.”
“Well, I’m not going.”
George went by himself.
How about Hamoa Beach with gray sand and 4000-foot-high cliffs hanging over the ocean?
“Gray sand? I’m supposed to be tempted by that?”
George went by himself.
Big Beach, Wailea Beach, Black Sand Beach?
“Big Beach, just bigger than ours? And black sand? That’s attractive. Now white sand beach on the Gulf of Mexico, that’s attractive, that’s nice. It doesn’t get hot, and it’s so fine, it’s like flour. Why didn’t we get a condo in Florida?”
“Because you said there were too many storms and it was too hot and humid.”
“I never said that, never. It would have been a beautiful life.”
George went by himself.
Lahaina, the Road to Hana, the rainforest?
“You want me to go see trees, George? Walk along the road and into the trees? Poland had forests. And roads. Is it going to rain in the rainforest? I don’t think so.”
George went by himself. Allison came with him to Lahaina once because there was shopping in Lahaina.
“Maui, the god of sun, the cursed god of sun. He cursed this place with perpetual long days of sunshine,” said Allison.
George tried a different tactic.
“What about if we go to the mainland, Allie? Let’s fly to San Francisco, and we’ll drive down south to Las Vegas. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Something hot, yes. Do you have any idea what the temperature is in Las Vegas in July? It’s a hundred and twenty degrees. And what are we going to do, rent a car? We can’t afford such an expense. You’re retired now, George.”
He suggested bringing their own car on a ship to San Francisco.
“What, our car, with no AC, in July? We’ll suffocate before we leave California. Look, get it out of your head. I’m not going to the mainland in the summer. You know I don’t feel well, I can’t be traveling in such heat with all my problems. It’ll set me back ten years.”
He suggested making plans to go in the fall when the weather became cooler. He was playing on her love of the slots. On her love of getting dress
ed up and like a proper civilized person giving her money away willingly and happily to a small steel machine.
Viva! Las Vegas.
But she couldn’t face the thought of traveling anywhere with George, of spending every waking moment with him and sleeping moment, too, for they could hardly get two hotel rooms, could they? The thought of not having a room of her own to retire to where she could close the door, and when no one would see her, was too difficult even as a thought to Allison. She couldn’t imagine it, how could she ever live it?
“Would you stop pestering me already! What’s this compulsion with always going, going, going? Why can’t you sit still for a moment? And if you wanted your beloved continent so much, why did we buy a condo in Maui, then, huh? Why did you push me to buy one here?”
George reminded her she was the one who had wanted to live in Maui.
“Oh, that’s right, blame it all on me. Well, fine, we’re here, and I’m paying plenty for this condo, I’m not leaving it for three months to go somewhere else. What an idiotic waste of money. You always were a spendthrift. That’s why you don’t have any money now.”
Slowly, very slowly, he suggested selling the condo and moving back east. To North Carolina, perhaps, where there was fishing and gardening, and seasons, and lakes—where his brother lived.
“We just got here and you want to move already? You’re sick, that’s what you are. You need professional help, why can’t you be happy anywhere, why? It’s beautiful here, what the hell is wrong with you? You have too much time on your hands, that’s your problem.”
And then she started falling down.
After the first time she fell, he asked her about it, and she said, “Cough syrup. Haven’t you been paying any attention to what’s going on with me? I’m very sick.” She coughed for emphasis.
“Maybe if you left the apartment once for five minutes in a whole month, you’d feel better.”
“Oh, that’s great! Go ahead, scream at a sick woman!”