The Girl in Times Square

“Then why do you take them in a combination?”

“Oh, I suppose that’s what you want, your depressed wife to cough herself to death!”

In the mornings she was always in a terrible mood, and in the afternoons George didn’t see her because she was sleeping. He hated cooking only for himself, hated eating alone. But what could he do? He would have tuna sashimi, with some soy sauce and wasabi. He had never had tuna of the kind he bought in Maui, or pineapples. He ate them in the afternoon, while he planned his dinner menu, read cookbooks, went on the computer, emailed his friends, called one of his children and sat on the patio, smoking and waiting for his wife to awaken. The sun was bright, the wind high, the trees sparkling green, and twice a week the rolling lawns in the condo units were mowed and the air smelled so green and fresh and cut-grassy as he ate his dripping mangoes.

Allison got up hours before George, despite the black blankets she hung on her windows to keep the light out. As soon as the Hawaiian sun shot an arrow of light over the horizon at five, Allison was up. She didn’t want to be up. She wished she could sleep soundly through till midday. When the children were small, isn’t that what she had dreamed about? Isn’t that what her oldest daughter dreams about now, with four little ones of her own? To sleep and not be awakened? Why won’t Allison’s body sleep past the squinting sunrise?

It’s that Hawaiian sunrise.

At night she stayed up until two or three in the morning, watching old movies, infomercials, the psychic network, the shopping channel, and had big plans for herself for the next day. Big plans. She would get up, and go for that cursed beach walk with him, and she would clean and do laundry and then maybe they would go out for the afternoon, go for a drive, into the fucking rainforest, into the fucking volcano. To Lahaina maybe where she could do a little shopping, a little window browsing. They would find a restaurant right on the ocean and have dinner while watching the sunset. Oh, and she would read. She had the time. Her older daughters kept sending her novels to read. Her small condo was overwhelmed with their packages. It’s not that she didn’t try to read. She did. She just couldn’t read a single sentence through to the end. Not one. Her mind would start wandering, she would lose track of her thoughts, she would start examining her hands, dotted with age, darkened with the years. Her nails, thinking about polish, red or clear? She would—

Nothing held her interest, not a single word in anybody else’s life. Don’t they know what’s happening to me, she wanted to cry. I’m old. My skin is sagging, and the corners of my eyes have turned down. I’m bloated and I’ve got skin where I shouldn’t have any.

The look of love is in your eyes …

Sometimes music played from the past in the quiet condo.

I want to be young again, she cried, standing by the window. I want to be young and to swim in the sea, and fall in love, I want to be beautiful and watch him fall in love with me.

She told this to George and he flung out his hand and said, “Swim in the sea every fucking morning, Allison.”

“You don’t understand anything,” she said. “I said swim in the sea young.”

She wasn’t growing old gracefully.

The day was so long, there was so much of it, and there was nothing she wanted to do, there was nothing she needed to do. Was Hawaii beautiful? Yes, so what. Peaceful? Still so what. She constantly wished for rain. Rain! Sky be cloudy! Be gray.

Every day was like every other. The morning was crisp, in the afternoon there were winds, and the evening was all gold hues and still waters. Come another day and another and another. After living in seasonal New York so many years, after coming from damp northern Poland as a little girl, Allison had said all her life that what she wanted was somewhere warm to rest her weary bones. They came to Maui when they heard it was paradise. And here it was.

Allison had never been more miserable.

She cleaned the condo, but that took all of an hour. She showered. She made her bed. She made coffee. She smoked. She pretended to read the paper, she pretended to read books, she thumbed through catalogs, she indifferently watched TV. She didn’t know how to make her life right. If only she hadn’t had all those children. They sapped, sucked what young life she had had and weren’t any comfort to her in her old age either. She never heard from them. Even from youngest to whom she still sent money. Allison didn’t hear from Lily the most. The ungrateful youngest child. The noose around the neck of Allison’s thwarted ambitions.

But it wasn’t the nonexistent career she lamented the most. It wasn’t the children. It wasn’t the husband. It was the loss of youth, the loss of youthful beauty, the loss of skin tone and smoothness, the pert freshness of her young legs, her arms, her flat stomach; it was the vertical lines, the horizontal lines, it was the neck that no amount of Creme de la Mer could fix. Youth. In the war against Time, her minuscule armies were being defeated, and it wasn’t an even fight. Time knew she wasn’t a mythical creature that sloughed off its old skin as it went into the sea and came out fresh to her daughters and granddaughters as the young girl inside the old woman. This was no time for myths. The whole day time toyed with Allison, laughed at her.

And at five in the morning when she woke up with the sun peeking promise through her room darkening blankets, time mocked her the most.

8 (#ulink_95672546-ac62-5904-afa4-69f3e99c836f)

The Disadvantages of Walking to Work (#ulink_95672546-ac62-5904-afa4-69f3e99c836f)

Spencer was outside Lily’s door. It was the end of June. She was wearing her work uniform—black pants and white shirt. Her short hair was slicked back and still wet.

“Detective … if Amy comes back, don’t you think you’ll be the first one I’ll call?”

“I don’t know, will I be?”

“Isn’t there some other vice in this city besides missing persons? Isn’t anyone committing crimes out there? I know the mayor’s ‘Clean Up New York’ program has been a considerable success, but there must be something else for you to do.” They turned the corner and continued walking down Avenue C.

“There isn’t.” He looked dispirited. “These missing person cases …”

“Is this a standard case, then?” Lily wished she hadn’t said that. It sounded so flip. What if he said yes? Yes, this is just one of our regular, run-of-the-mill, nothing-special-about-it cases. In one month it won’t be a case anymore. It will be a statistic. Lily shivered in the heat. Why did she ask?

But Spencer to his credit said, “Amy is not a standard case.” And when Lily was afraid to look at him, lest she see the lying in his eyes and he see the skepticism in hers, he repeated, “Really. She is not. Missing person cases are in many cases misunderstandings. Someone moves away and doesn’t leave a forwarding address. Or someone goes for that planned two week trip to Europe and decides to stay for three months. Or the teenager runs away with her boyfriend whom her mother forbids her to see. The family hires a private eye, and with luck finds them in two weeks.”

“There’s no private eye for Amy.” Lily said that wistfully.

“Oh, but there is.”

She stopped walking and looked at him in surprise.

“Jan McFadden is paying for him. Lenny, the muckwader, sacked after twenty years on the force. We sacked him, now suddenly he’s indispensable.”

“Is he a gumshoe, Detective O’Malley?” Gumshoe was such a funny word.

“Gumshoe is one way to describe him. He is an unhealthy version of my partner, with less fashion sense. Lenny hasn’t turned up anything. And that’s saying something because Lenny trudges up dirt we don’t even ask for.” Spencer paused. “Lenny is … shall we say, a bottom dweller.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good then. Amy is obviously not at the bottom.”

“Who knows? She’s made herself impossible to trace. But don’t you see, in the discarded identification is everything. She didn’t leave her identity behind every time she went out. You said so yourself. Sometimes she left it, you said. When Amy left the apartment without ID, it meant one of two things: either she was trying to protect herself, or she was trying to protect whoever she was with.”

Lily was quiet. “She wasn’t that calculating. Maybe she’s working somewhere. What about a check of some kind, Social Security maybe?

“Last Social Security entry dates back to the second week in May, when the tax was taken out of her paycheck at the Copa Cobana.”

He had already been so thorough. “Anything else to check?”

Without looking at her, Spencer said, “In New York State there have been no reports of deceased unidentified young women either in hospitals, morgues or funeral parlors. There have been no reports of unidentified young women found in crashed cars, train wrecks or public parks. And believe me, we have men combing through every bush around the Central Park reservoir. It should only take us another three or four years to search every acre.”

She was storming for other ideas, trying to be helpful, walking briskly. Lafayette Street never seemed so far away. He walked alongside her. “Maybe,” said Lily, her voice weakening with the slowing of her heart, “Amy doesn’t want to be found.”

“Maybe,” said Spencer, “Amy wants to be found but can’t be.”

9 (#ulink_d0ed0049-a31d-5ed4-871b-af05300dd69e)

Ignorance in Amy’s Bed (#ulink_d0ed0049-a31d-5ed4-871b-af05300dd69e)

Lily was awake at three in the morning. She was lying in Amy’s bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Amy, trying to trick her mind into not thinking about Amy. There was something bothering Lily terribly. She kicked off the covers, she spread her arms and legs, pretending to fly. Her limbs felt a peculiar aching, and her heart wasn’t letting go of the needles. A water faucet dripped in the bathroom; Lily could hear it clearly through the open door. She wanted to get up and close the door but couldn’t.

Something was wrong inside her. Her weakness, her sadness, her exhaustion. Maybe Spencer was right, maybe she should go talk to somebody. But who?

Lily could not go to sleep. An inner beast was gnashing its teeth on her spleen, sucking out her bone marrow—Oh God!

Suddenly she jumped up off the bed. Where did she get the energy to do that? She was so tired. But she jumped out of bed and stood for a moment, panting, looking down at Amy’s quilt, Amy’s pillows, Amy’s sheets.

She went into the bathroom and then into the kitchen to get some water. Afterward she sat cross-legged on the floor in her own empty bedroom and dialed 1-800-m-a-t-t-r-e-s, leaving the last S off for savings. In fifteen minutes, at four in the morning, she bought herself a full-size mattress with a frame, all for five hundred bucks—her last week’s earnings—and it was going to be delivered just hours later at eleven. What a country.

After she hung up with the bed people, Lily lay on the futon in the living room/hallway and turned on the miserable middle-of-the-night TV, channel-surfed for a few nightmarish minutes—cream on your face, psychic on the 900 line, lose weight fast with our successful formula—then picked up the phone again and called the precinct. The night-time officer asked if it was an emergency, and she didn’t think it was, but she couldn’t be sure.