The Girl in Times Square
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PAULLINA SIMONS
THE GIRL IN TIMES SQUARE
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
Copyright © Paullina Simons 2004
“Lost in the Flood” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1972
Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
“Fire” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1978
Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved.
“Across the Border” by Bruce Springsteen. Copyright © 1995
Bruce Springsteen. All rights reserved.
Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007118939
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007383979
Version: 2018-05-24
Dedication
For my sister, Elizabeth, as ever searching And for Melanie Cain, who has been to the crying room
Epigraph
In the Vatican after they have chosen a new pope, they lead him to a room off the Sistine Chapel where he is given the clothing of a pope. It is called the Crying Room. It is called that because it is there that the burdens and responsibilities of the papacy tend to come crashing down on the new pontiff. Many of them have wept. The best have wept.
PEGGY NOONAN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Past as Prologue
Just Before the Beginning
Lily Quinn
Allison Quinn
A Man and a Woman
Part I. In the Beginning
1. Appearing To Be One Thing When it is in Fact Another
2. Hawaii
3. An Hour at the 9th Precinct
4. Wallets on Dressers
5. Spencer Patrick O’Malley
6. Conversations with Mothers
7. Birds of Paradise
8. The Disadvantages of Walking to Work
9. Ignorance in Amy’s Bed
10. Things in the Closet
11. Spencer Patrick O’Malley and Lilianne Quinn
12. A Little Rented Honda
13. Lily and the City of Dreams
14. Riding Shotgun
15. Spencer’s Twelve Tickets
16. Reality: The Actual Thing that it Appears to Be
Part II. The Middle of the Road
17. The Biggest River in Egypt
18. Fertility Options
19. Fibers of Suspicion
20. Just Another Saturday Night for Lily
21. Just Another Saturday Night for Spencer
22. In the Garden of the Barber Cop
23. Chemotherapy 101
24. Meet the Parents
25. Chemo 202
26. The Church on 51st Street
27. Liz Monroe and 57/57
28. The Soup Kitchen
29. Spencer Stuck Twice
30. Advanced Chemotherapy
31. Advanced Interrogation
32. Andrew’s Alibi
33. The Laugh Track
34. Lily’s Stations
35. Lily’s Mother is Here
36. Lily’s Stations, Continued
37. Beautiful People
38. Cancer Shmancer
39. Larry DiAngelo as Imhotep
Part III. The End Game
40. Lily as an Ancient Egyptian
41. Shopping as Healing
42. The Financial and Eating Woes of a Lottery Winner and a Cancer Survivor
43. A Little Thing about Spencer
44. The Muse
45. A Masters Course in Chemo
46. The Mighty Quinn
47. Harkman
48. The Yellow Ribbons
49. Baseball as a Metaphor for Everything
50. April Fools
51. At Internal Affairs Once More
52. Failing Test Number One
53. A Cop First
54. Infernal Affairs
55. Failing Test Number Two
56. Unraveling at Home and Overseas
57. An Encounter at Tompkins Square
58. Eight Days in Maui
59. And Now—About Spencer
60. John Doe
61. Olenka Pevny
62. Lindsey
63. A Terminal Degree in Cancer Treatment
64. Amy and Andrew
65. Nathan Sinclair
66. A Boat in Key Biscayne
67. Cabo San Lucas
68. A Day at the Abbey
69. An Anarchist in Action
70. Massacre Grounds
71. The Cancer Chick and the Revolutionary
72. The Peyote Dance
73. The Lessons of the Russian Tsar
74. Acting Without Measure
75. The Postman
76. The Only One
77. Wollman’s Rink
78. DNR
79. And Now—About Amy
80. The Other Side
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
THE PAST AS PROLOGUE
“Spencer, do you see this?”
“Katie, I do.”
“Her investments are shooting out of the sky. I’ve never seen anything like it. Her fund is growing at rate of thirty-four percent a year.”
“Joy, should we have some lunch?”
“Stop smiling at me like that, Larry, I know what your lunch entails. I can’t. I’m knitting.”
Giggling.
“Did you read the paper this morning? In Ethiopia, a grenade exploded at a wedding, killing the bride and three other people.”
“Mother, please!”
“What? Apparently it’s custom for guests to fire their guns at weddings in wild jubilation, though grenades are apparently more rare.”
“You’ll have to excuse my mother, Detective O’Malley.”
“Thank you, but I’m quite entertained by her, Mrs. Quinn.”
“Mrs. Quinn, how are you feeling?”
“I could be better, Dr. DiAngelo. I’m tired all the time. And I wanted to show you this.” There is a pause, the sound of shoes walking across the floor. “What do you think this is? Some kind of a weird rash, right?”
“Allie, do you think you can stop showing the doctor your ailments with the police in the room?”
“Oh, Detective O’Malley has seen worse than this, Mother. Haven’t you, detective?”
“Much worse, and please—call me Spencer.”
“No, Allie, I just don’t understand you at all. Why do this now? It’s just a rash!”
“Oh, you can talk about your Ethiopian exploding brides, but I can’t show the doctor a real problem? The doctor is here, I might as well take advantage, right, Dr. DiAngelo?”
“Absolutely Mrs. Quinn. Let’s see what you’ve got here.”
There is sighing, clothes rustling, a silence, an ahem, a “Well, what is it?”
“Well, Mrs. Quinn, it’s very serious, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, no, what is it, doctor?”
“I’m afraid—I think—I can’t be sure, but I think it’s the Baghdad boil.”
There is silence, a slight familiar snicker from a man’s throat.
“A what?”
“Yes. A tiny sand fly from the Middle East with a fierce parasite stewing in its gut that causes stubborn and ugly sores that linger for months, sometimes years.”
There is a shrieking of incredulous disgust. “Doctor, what are you talking about? What sandflies from the Middle East? We’re in the middle of New York City! It’s just a little chafing, that’s all, very normal, just a little chafing.”
“Larry!”
“Yes, Joy?”
“Stop torturing the poor woman, this is completely unacceptable. Tell her you’re an oncologist, not a dermatologist. Allison, don’t listen to a word he says, he knows nothing but cancer. He is just trying to rile you.”
“Oh.” And then, “I find that completely unacceptable.”
There is laughter everywhere.
No one even noticed when Lily opened her eyes. She was propped up in bed, in her clean hospital room with beige walls, and her paintings everywhere, and white lilies everywhere because they just don’t listen. It seemed like mid-morning. In front of her was the TV, to the right of her was the open window with white lilies in front of it, with a bit of sky beyond them, her mother and grandmother were on that side, and on the other, to her left, sat Spencer. Behind him stood Katie, looking over his shoulder at the financial statements. To his right sat Joy, still knitting, the yellow sweater sizable now. Next to her was DiAngelo, standing close. Lily didn’t move, just her eyes blinked. It was Spencer who looked up from the statements, lifted his eyes, and noticed an awake Lily.
Spencer said, “Lily, I think your broker deserves a raise. Because while you were lying about in the hospital, grafting marrow, she made you seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars.”
“Sleeping Beauty is awake!” said her mother.
“Lily, finally! I mean, we always said, oh, but did that child love to sleep, but I think you’ve outdone yourself,” said her grandmother.
Lily couldn’t speak. The breathing tube was in her mouth. She moved her hand to remove the tube, and immediately started choking. “Good God,” she croaked. “How long have I been here?”
DiAngelo put the tube back in her throat, adjusted the mask over her face, the clip over her nose, placed her hands back down on the blanket. “Since your transplant? Eighteen days. Don’t speak. Write it down on the Magna Doodle.”
She pulled the mask, the nose clip, the breathing hose out again. Breathing, gasping. “Where’s Papi?”
“Oh, you know your father,” said Allison. “He can’t sit still for a second. He’s out smoking. He told me this morning, let’s just go for an hour, Allie, and then we’ll take a walk in Central Park. He’s impossible.”
Lily and her mother looked at each other for a few moments, Maui in their eyes.
“It’s a good thing you woke up. You are about to miss your twenty-sixth birthday,” said Allison. “You can sleep through anything.”
Lily said between breaths, “Do you see the picture I made for you?” She pointed to the oil on canvas of a little blonde girl in the close lap of a brown-haired woman on a bench in a village yard.
“I see it,” said Allison. She said nothing for a second. “I don’t know who that’s supposed to be. Doesn’t look like me at all.”
“Lily,” said Joy. “Come on, get up. You can’t be lying around all day. We booked a very large room at the Plaza to celebrate your birthday.”
Lily turned her head to look at Joy inquisitively.
Marcie came in. “Oh, look at this, I’m gone for five minutes and Spunky wakes!”
“Yes, Spunky,” said Spencer, “get up. Because Keanu is playing in The Replacements and The Watcher. You’ve got double Keanu waiting for you.”
Lily took the tube out. “Hey,” she mouthed. “Can you give him and me a minute?”
They gladly filed out of the room, and Spencer came close to her, putting his head in the space between her opened arm and her neck. She held his head, caressed his grown-out hair. There were tears in his eyes he didn’t want her to see. This time it was she who said, “Shh, shh.”
“Tell me,” she said, taking quick breaths of oxygen between her words, “did I miss anything?”
“Nothing,” Spencer replied, his caressing hand on her face. “It is all as you left it.”
In October Lily was off the respirator. By Thanksgiving, she was released from the hospital. She never went back to 9th Street and Avenue C. She stayed with Spencer until they found a floor-through apartment in one of the buildings in brand-spanking-new Battery Park City, all the way downtown overlooking the Hudson River, with fourteen-foot ceilings, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, plenty of closets, and a huge living room that became an art space appropriate for a girl preparing for her first gallery show. The living room had a 39th floor view of the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. The whole shebang was quite something and didn’t set her back eleven million. “That’s because it has no crown molding,” pointed out Spencer.
Once Lily asked him what he would have done if she had died, and he mumbled and joked and equivocated his way through an answer, but in the dark of night in their bed, he said, “I would have taken your money, given a quarter to your family, a quarter to the American Leukemia Foundation, and retired from the force. I would have moved to Florida, and opened a gumshoe agency on the waters of Key Biscayne. I would have been warm all the time, maybe built a Spanish contemporary home. That way I would have lived where you had wanted to live, in a house you would have liked. I would have planted palm trees for you, and gone out on the sea for you and thought of you as my last rose of the summer.”
Spencer drank less. The intervals between his bouts got longer, and once he went for four months without. He told Lily that he couldn’t expect more out of life than being with a girl who made him go four whole months without whisky in the hands. “Well, because now Lily’s in the hands,” she said. “Your hands are full.”
Lily continued to go to Paul at Christopher Stanley for her color, despite Spencer’s maintaining that anyone who changed his own hair as often as Paul—from bleached blond to brown and back again constantly—should not be trusted.
Spencer still cuts Lily’s hair.
To continue to be partnered with Gabe, Spencer asked Whittaker to transfer him out of missing persons and into homicide. At the celebratory lunch at McLuskey’s, Gabe maintained to Lily it was all so that Spencer could finally proclaim, “This is Detective O’Malley from homicide.”
Grandma left her house and came every Thursday to meet Lily for lunch. Afterward she and Lily went to the movies, and then Lily took Grandma back to Brooklyn where Spencer came to pick her up after work.
And sometimes, while Manhattan Island twinkled across the river, Lily and Spencer still parked at their Greenpoint docks in his Buick while Bruce Springsteen rocked on the radio.
Anne left KnightRidder and found a new job as a financial writer for Cantor Fitzgerald. She had an office on the south side of the north tower of the World Trade Center, on the 105th floor, and on a clear day she thought she could see all the way to Atlantic City. The New York Harbor, Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty, Verazano Bridge, and the Atlantic Ocean stretched out before her. She had her desk turned around so she could sit every morning when she got in at eight, and sip her coffee and get ready for her day. She told everyone that she had started a new, happier life. Her sisters came to visit her every Monday for lunch. That’s how they repaired their sisterly bonds. Lily left her painting, Amanda left her children with a babysitter, and they met at noon, taking turns choosing a restaurant. Anne wouldn’t let anyone else pick up the tab. “It’s the least I can do,” she said to Lily. And every other Tuesday morning, Anne took Lily to Mount Sinai for her blood work. When Cantor complained about her coming in at eleven on alternate Tuesdays—despite the fact that she stayed in the office until nine those evenings—Anne said they could fire her if they wished, but it was a deal-breaker: she was going to take her sister who was in remission to the hospital.
Cantor Fitzgerald didn’t fire her.
George and Allison sold their Maui condo and came back to the continent, buying a small house in North Carolina, near the Blue Ridge Mountains. Their house was on a little lake where George had a dock from which he fished, and a row boat that he took out every once in a while. He had a vegetable garden and planted a hundred times more than he could eat, praising America for its bounty. He gave all of his vegetables to his summer neighbors. He bought a TV and a satellite dish, and watched sports live and movies galore and went on the Internet, and cooked for Allison, and for his brother and his wife, who lived nearby. He had a busy life. He didn’t travel much, and Allison didn’t either, having learned how to buy gin right off the Internet and have the UPS man deliver it straight to her front door.
George misses his wife. But the tomatoes are very good in the summer. And there’s fishing.
Larry DiAngelo married Joy. They adopted a baby girl from South Korea, and they called her Lily. Joy retired from nursing and stayed home with her baby, in unrepentant daily bliss, cooking and watching Disney videos.
Jim left Jan McFadden. She had no choice but to get into shape and raise her twin children. Every Saturday she goes to the Port Jefferson cemetery on Route 112, and sits by the purple stone with the lilac flowers, easily the most decorated grave in the cemetery, the most colorful, the most vibrant, you can see it from the winding road half a mile away, the purples and violets shout like animated billboards against the gray of the rest. Our beloved daughter and friend, Amy Jean McFadden, 1975–1999.
When Lily talks of Amy, she still says “She has left.” Or, “She has gone missing.”
When Lily can bear to speak of Andrew, she still says, “He has left.” Or, “He has gone missing.”
A small plaque, a favorite quote, written in calligraphy by Amy: When senseless hatred rules the earth, where will redemption reside? hung on the door of Amy’s studio as a last remainder from Amy’s life on 9th Street and Avenue C, and then was stored, deep in Lily’s large closet in Battery Park City, at the back of her summer T-shirts, until Lily found it one day and gave it to Anne, who liked it so much she hung it up in her office on the 105th floor of the North Tower.
One of these New York mornings—it was too beautiful to stay inside, even for Lily who usually liked to go back to bed after Spencer left for work. But she saw the bright and clear skies and seventy-five degrees and no wind—it was a magnificent Maui morning in her New York, when everything seemed not only possible but attainable—and she decided to walk with him two miles to the precinct and then maybe head on to Madison Square Park and sketch the Flatiron while the light was this good, and would soon be gone. She waited for him, basking on the warm side of the street while he went inside the deli to get them coffees. They really must get a coffee maker that worked.
Lily’s blood tests had been so good lately that DiAngelo finally approved a vacation, and Spencer—who’d never been anywhere—finally and with a little convincing, approved one, too. Not to Maui, not to Cabo San Lucas, not to Arizona, but to Key Biscayne. Two weeks, alone with Spencer! They were leaving in a few days and would stay through her 27th birthday.
A convertible buzzed by on quiet Albany Street heading to West Side Highway. The entire downtown Manhattan was in Lily’s view from north to south. A man was putting up flyers for the mayoral primary elections, on this second Tuesday in September, 2001, tacking the posters up on the pole right next to her. Her heart caught on the memory of the poles, the posters, the convertible, the long gone, the long missing.
Lily lowered her head for a moment, then raised it up to the sky and breathed in the air. It was too glorious a day.
Spencer came out of the deli and smiled at her, motioning for her to cross the street, as in, come on, I don’t have all day. She smiled back and waved, lingering just a little longer with the sun upon her face, her sketchbooks in her hands.
Lily knew that Spencer, always glad for small mercies, was glad for this: that she had been comatose and near death when Amy’s bones were discovered off the Bridle Path, because this let Lily remember Amy only as she once had been—wholly imagined and loved—and not as she really was, a person Lily never knew.
And in her new life Lily Quinn, now living each last day with first joy, could continue to hope with a great enchanting hope that maybe her brother Andrew and her friend Amy looked for each other in a place where there were no other lovers, that maybe she had waited for him until he became lost himself and abandoned his convertible after church on Sunday in the waters of the Hudson and she was waving to him from the other side, across the river. The girl slowed down, the man hopped in, and they sped away in a little rented Honda. Amy and Andrew, Allison and George, Claudia and Tomas, and Lily and her Spencer could maybe speed away, forever looking for a place where they would never be found. Without demands, without dead ends, without alcohol, without protocol, a safe place with no sorrow, no monocytes, no blastocytes, no whisky, no war, just a little bit of mercy, a wet and sunny life, and the remains of their fathomless frail free human hearts.
Lily Quinn
What happened to love? Lily whispered to herself. Has someone else taken all that was given out for the universe, or have I just not been trying hard enough? What happened to overwhelming, crushing love, the kind of love that moves earth and heaven, the kind of love my Grandma felt for her Tomas half a century ago in another world in another life, the kind of love my father says he felt for my mother when they first met swimming in that warm Caribbean Sea? Doesn’t anyone have that kind of love anymore? Isn’t anyone without armor, without walls, without pain? Isn’t anyone willing to die for love?
Obviously not tonight.
They called her Lil. Sometimes, when they loved her, they called her Liliput. She liked that. And sometimes when they didn’t love her they called her Lilianne. Tonight nobody called her nothin’. Lily, hungry and broke, stood silently with her back against the wall watching Joshua pack his things while she remained just a stoic stain on the wall, eyes the color of bark, hair like ash, dressed in black—somewhat appropriately, she thought, despite what he had said: “It’s only temporary, just to give us a short break. We need it.”