The Girl in Times Square

by Paullina Simons

  “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.

  Acknowledgments

  Heartfelt thanks to Joy Chamberlain for her very own mediation of calm and dedication to the cause.

  To Pavla Salacova without whom the adored offspring would be street urchins.

  To Kevin, the guardian angel, the husband, the man, the everything.

  About the Author

  THE GIRL IN TIMES SQUARE

  Paullina Simons was born in Leningrad and emigrated to the United States in 1973. She lives close to New York with her husband and four children. Go to her website, www.paullinasimons.com, for more information about her novels.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.co.uk for exclusive updates on Paullina Simons.

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  Copyright

  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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  TWENTY-FIRST EDITION

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

  Copyright © Paullina Simons 2004

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  Reprinted by permission.

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