The Girl in Times Square

“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 sisters’? 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.