The Girl in Times Square

“Detective O’Malley is not on call tonight, miss. I can tell him in the morning when he comes in that you called. Are you in trouble?”

Lily thought she was. But to the officer she said no and, hanging up, lay on the futon, turning the sound off on the TV and staring at the flickering screen. She thought of calling the beeper number on his business card, but didn’t. Words from an almost forgotten Springsteen song kept going round in her head. Hey man, did you see that?/His body hit the street with such a beautiful thud/I wonder what the dude was sayin’/or was he just lost in the flood?

She played around with the remote and adjusted the colors to black and white. Now she was watching the Psychic Network in black and white and as she stared into the TV all Lily kept thinking about was the weeks and weeks she had spent sleeping in Amy’s bed without ever bothering to get her own, as if she knew in her deepest, blackest heart that Amy was not coming back.

They had plans to get jobs together. They were both artists, they both painted. Lily liked to paint people, she had a facility with faces and bodies. Amy liked to paint still life—chairs, pots, trees. They sketched together in Washington Square Park and in Union Square Park, and in Battery Park, and even in the homeless-addled, heroin-addled Tompkins Square Park. They sketched the nightlines of Broadway and Fifth Avenue and later painted in the colors. But in many sketches, particularly of late, Lily had been noticing that while she continued to add color where color was needed, Amy left her own work black and white, gray, tonal, uncolored. There were no yellows of street lights, no reds of traffic signs, no blues of police cars. Amy’s night-time Statue of Liberty, night-time World Trade Center, night-time Empire State Building remained dark and colorless. One sketch was all black tones, and when Lily asked what that was, Amy replied that it was Times Square from Broadway at midnight. Where are the billboards, Lily asked. They’re always lit. It’s foggy, said Amy, sounding so empty. It’s a blackout. Can’t see them. Why was Lily remembering all that now?

She slept on the futon and remembered Amy, and when she woke up, Amy was so vivid as if she were still in bed sleeping.

And Lily cried.

The mattress came, the iron frame. She tipped the two Hispanic delivery guys twenty bucks for being young and flirty with her, showered, got dressed and went to work a double. After making one-hundred-and-seventy dollars, she took a cab back home. She paid ten bucks to take a cab home from work every night now, the days of no cabs long behind her. One evening it had occurred to her that if only she cashed in her 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1, she could have a limo and a driver waiting for her every night when she finished her shift as a diner waitress. Lily had laughed and walked home that night.

Tonight Spencer was waiting for her on the front stoop. “How long is that shift, anyway?” he said, closing his police notebook.

She couldn’t help a small smile. “Detective O’Malley, it’s nine thirty at night. Don’t you ever not work?”

“Not when I have a mother who calls me every day wanting to know if I’ve found her child,” said Spencer.

Lily stopped smiling and was silent. Silent or defeated. She made to move around him but he took her arm. “Why did you call me in the middle of the night, Lilianne?”

“I—” she stammered.

“Did you have something to tell me?”

“I just—I got worried about something.”

“About what?”

“I don’t remember now.”

They sat down on the stoop. It was a New York night in July, still dusky out, still hot out.

“I’m not Miss Quinn anymore?”

“When Miss Quinn calls me in the middle of the night she automatically becomes a Lilianne. City regulation 517.”

When does Lilianne become a Lily? she wanted to ask but didn’t. It sounded too flirty.

Spencer said, “The Odessa Café on Avenue A and 7th has very good stuffed cabbages, and I’m starved. Can I work and eat?”

“Will eating count as working?”

“Of course. Dining with witnesses. It’s called canvassing. Come. While you eat, you can try to remember what you were thinking about at four in the morning. But you know, don’t you, that if you’re calling me at that time of night, I’m going to think Amy has come back.”

“Unfortunately, no.” Lily struggled up from the stoop and saw he struggled with resisting helping her. She wanted to ask if she could call him Spencer. Seemed odd to be so formal. “You must see quite a bit on these mean streets, no?”

“Yes, especially in your neighborhood.”

“Did you say you drove a patrol car on the LIE before coming to New York?”

“Yes.”

“You went from being a traffic cop on the expressway to manning a special division?”

“Before that I was for years a senior detective up in Dartmouth College.”

Lily perked up. “That must have been some great job! I actually took a tour of Dartmouth in my senior year in high school. It sure looked like an awesome place to go to school.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I didn’t go to school there. I wouldn’t know.”

“But what kind of investigative experience was that for you? Arresting frat boys on Saturday nights for underage drinking?”

“If only,” said Spencer.

Lily glanced at him with curiosity. “More?”

“A little more.”

Was he clamming up? “Detective … does Ivy League Dartmouth have a steamy underside?”

“I don’t know if steamy is the right word. Maybe wicked.”

“Oh, do please tell. I love wicked stories.”

“Another time. Though I do like your faith in the things you believe to be true. It’s very youthful.” He smiled. “I’m slightly less youthful.”

At the diner after they sat and ordered, Lily said, “I remember what I wanted to tell you.”

“Is it something about Amy?”

“Yes. She took two years off between high school and college. Right after high school she went traveling cross country with some friends of hers from Port Jeff. Eventually I think she got tired of the whole thing and came home.”

Spencer became interested in Amy’s sabbatical. He asked about the people she traveled with. Lily told him what she knew which admittedly wasn’t much. Paul might know more, having gone to the same high school.

“What happened to them all? Did they come back to Long Island, like Amy?”

Lily wasn’t sure. The only thing she thought she knew for sure was that one committed suicide, one OD’d, one was killed in a drunk driving accident, smashing their traveling van, and two were still at large. But she wasn’t sure.

Spencer stopped eating his stuffed cabbage.

Lily coughed. “Amy was evasive when she talked about this period in her life. She told me some anecdotes, of Kansas, of New Orleans, but she barely volunteered information other than to tell me a little about her friends, and to caution me against using drugs.” Lily looked into her cold cabbage. “She was like you with Dartmouth. Cagey.”

Spencer tapped on the table to get her attention. “You better hope she wasn’t like me at Dartmouth. But are you telling me that of the six people that went in one beat up van—three of them are dead?”

“If you put it like that.”

“How would you put it?”