Paullina Simons - The Girl in Times Square

“If you put it like that.”

“How would you put it?”

“Just life, detective. Car accidents, drugs, suicides. What else kills the young these days?” Lottery tickets?

Spencer quietly studied Lily. “Aren’t you wise. I’ll tell you what else kills young people. Unlawful killing. Homicide. Manslaughter. Killing with depraved indifference to human life. Murder. But two more people missing? Paul must know these kids. They all went to the same high school. Tomorrow you and I will go talk to him.”

“Spencer—I mean Detective O’Malley …” Lily turned red. He smiled. “I don’t know if Paul knows anything. But these kids aren’t the important thing.”

“You don’t think so? Six people in one car meeting with extreme fate? Not important?”

Lily wondered if their birthdays or significant digits were 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1. But why would she wonder that? What did her six numbers have to do with six people she did not know?

She knew Amy. Amy was 24.

Lily was 24, too.

This was a stupid line of thinking. Lily wished Spencer hadn’t led her to it with his talk of fate.

When he went to pay and took his cash out, a stash of lottery tickets fell out of his wallet. She laughed. “Aren’t you an optimist. Are you collecting them?”

“Yes, when I get to twelve, I check them all at once. But what, you just collect the one on your wall?”

Her heart skipped a beat, another. “So is there anything at all that you don’t notice, Detective O’Malley?”

“Obviously, Miss Quinn, or I wouldn’t still be looking for your roommate.”

They met the next afternoon in the downstairs reception area of the precinct to go see Paul at the salon. Spencer had on a suit jacket in which he looked boiling hot, while Lily had practically no clothes on at all, and still had glistening arms and legs and neck. New York City in July. Hot.

“A little warm in that jacket, detective?”

“I am, yes. But who’s going to take me seriously if I wear skimpy shorts and a tank top, Miss Quinn?”

Lily squinted. Another tease from Spencer? She didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he noticed her summer outfit. He didn’t seem to be the kind that noticed that sort of thing. He noticed everything, as an officer of the law, but not that sort of thing. Yet he said skimpy shorts. When she walked in front of him to cross the street she wondered if he was watching her.

“Your partner doesn’t come with you?”

“On little errands like this? Nah. You’ve seen Detective Harkman. He likes to save himself for the big trips. Most of the day, he’s just a housemouse.”

Lily laughed at the terminology.

At the salon, Paul declared that he knew “nothing about nothin’.” That period of Amy’s life, he told Spencer, was a two-year hole from which Amy emerged intact, as if the two years had never existed. She graduated high school, she disappeared, she went to find her wild and new self, she came back, her wild and new self found, and re-entered life. She enrolled at Hunter, became a waitress at a cocktail bar, transferred to City College where she met Lily, re-established her friendships, and did not talk about the two years on the road.

“I’m not asking about the two years on the road. I’m asking about the people Amy traveled with.”

Paul didn’t know them.

“You and she weren’t friendly in high school?”

“Best friendly.”

Spencer waited.

“We lived on the same block but we didn’t hang out with the same people, all right. She hung out with some real losers, and I didn’t. They weren’t musicians, they weren’t jocks, or nerds, or in choir. I don’t know who they were. I don’t know them, don’t know their names, don’t know what happened to them. Like I said, we didn’t travel in the same circles back then.”

“I see. Could you point them out in your high school yearbook?”

“God! I don’t see what it matters. It was six years ago. What does high school matter now?”

“Could you point them out in your high school yearbook?” repeated Spencer.

“No, I don’t think I could.”

“Did they belong to a club?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Were they political maybe?”

“Maybe. I don’t know about them. Political! They were just a bunch of going-nowhere potheads.”

“Amy too?”

“No, not her! She just got mixed up with the wrong people, all right?”

“Well,” said Spencer, “it would be all right, if Amy weren’t missing for two months, but since she is, it’s not all right, no. Your friend here seems to think it was something stronger than pot.”

Paul shot Lily a withering look, standing clutching his colorist’s chair. “Does Harlequin know this for sure?”

“Harlequin knows nothing for sure,” said Lily.

“Exactly,” said Paul.

Spencer led her away, his hand momentarily pressing her between her bare shoulder-blades.

Talking to Spencer about Amy was getting to be bad for Lily’s ego. It was like being with Joshua. It was occurring to Lily with startling alarm how many things she ought to have known that she didn’t know.

Did Amy live a life that was more troubled and troublesome than Amy let on, coming from white, middle-class, peaceful Port Jefferson? Did Amy have secrets she kept so well ? Or was Lily less interested than she realized? She didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

How long had Lily not been able to speak normally to her mother? When did her mother so thoroughly and completely check out of Lily’s life? Lily didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Ten years ago after that blasted emergency ulcer surgery? Nine years ago in Forest Hills when she fell out of a chair (!) in the apartment and broke her arm, and her father said, “Mommy is fine, she’s fine, don’t worry, she just fell.”? Lily thought it was an aberration, a Polish accident, it was so long ago. But there had hardly been a mother since then. What had her mother been doing for nine years ?

One more layer of bottomless ignorance.

It was five in the morning, the sun was barely up, while Allison, who was up, was up seething.

She never called, never, Allison thought, as she meandered from her room to the kitchen, wondering if she wanted something to eat. She didn’t even call when Allison sent her half her rent plus a little extra. Since Amy went missing, the entire $1500 has been on Lily’s shoulders, and Allison wanted to help her daughter, who didn’t even call to say thank you! Not even a thank you for sending nine-hundred dollars, as if the money were a given, a birthright.

Typical of her. Lily always took everything for granted, as if it all were just handed down on a large platter for the youngest child. Allison heard George snoring behind the louver doors of his small room. Hear that? He sleeps as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. Nothing fazes him. Not my ill health, not my depression, not my unhappiness, nothing. He doesn’t need me either.

She glanced at her bills, in a pile on the desk, at the unopened packages from Amanda and Anne. They kept sending those damn books. You’d think they’d call once instead.

Nobody calls.

Oh, Andrew calls every week, to say the quickest hello to her and to then to speak for half an hour to his father. Andrew, who’s got no time for anyone, speaks to George for half an hour every week! They pretend they’re talking politics, hockey, but what they’re really doing is ignoring her. And even Andrew has been calling less and less lately.

She went into her bathroom, and examined her face in the mirror. It was bloated and swollen. She examined her graying teeth (because of all the smoking and coffee) and her yellowing skin. She looked for the cranberry juice. She wasn’t feeling well. The cranberry juice would soothe her. Make her feel better. She poured herself a drop of cranberry juice into a highball and stared at it. All she wanted was relief from being awake at dawn. She couldn’t sleep, she didn’t want to eat, and there was nothing at all in the whole world she wanted to do. All she wanted was relief from this.