The Girl in Times Square Read online

  “Exactly,” Grandma went on. “Young, single, nearly graduated, working, having fun, living in peace. Why so glum? Not having any fun? Are you bulimic?”

  Soon, Lily wanted to say.

  “I wish I had been young in New York,” said Dana from Poland. “When I was Lily’s age I was in Treblinka, waiting for my turn in the shower rooms. If the Soviets hadn’t come, I’d be one of the piles of ashes the Nazis grew cabbages on.”

  The ladies grumbled their sympathy. All of them were first generation Americans, having come here because of The War that divided history into the before and after.

  “Oh how my granddaughters whine and whine,” said Soo Min from South Korea. “Born here, yet so critical. According to them everything is wrong with unromantic American men. I say to them, do you know that my fiancé was killed by the North Koreans in 1950? What I would give to have my Yung alive, not bringing me flowers, not remembering my birthday! Unromantic.” Delicately she snorted. She was so tiny, she did everything delicately, even smoke cigars. “How about just alive? Right, Claudia? Claudia here, married her Tomas in 1939, then he went to war as soon as Hitler invaded Poland and she never saw him again. The way she lives, you think she’s still waiting for him. But at least she got a daughter out of it and now a whole family. She is so lucky. Yung left nothing for me.”

  Lily noticed her grandmother didn’t nod, didn’t comment. Her grandmother, Klavdia Venkewicz, changed the subject away from her Tomas. “Your granddaughters don’t mention Envy, don’t mention Coveting,” Grandma said instead, glancing at Lily who sat mutely, her hands flat down under her legs. Traces of morphine were still in Lily, and she had taken two oxycontin before she came here. Probably the glass of wine was not a good idea. She was feeling delirious.

  The air in the room was stale, the ladies were smoking, their wine-infused nicotine and carbon dioxide mixing with their inexpensive perfume and the smelly French fromage. Somebody please open the window, Lily thought, and then struggled up to go open it herself.

  “What are you doing?” said Claudia. “The AC is on.”

  “It is?” said Lily, dropping back down. “You’re right, Grandma. In America we shouldn’t covet, we shouldn’t envy. We’ve got too much of plenty.”

  “That’s right,” said Dana. “But my daughter isn’t satisfied. She’s on her fifth marriage and she’s only forty-nine. She’s still looking for the right one, and I say still looking because apparently husband number five is not taking out the garbage without being told. I tell her, in Poland we were lucky if we could hold on to our one husband, who cared about the garbage.”

  The other ladies murmured their animated assent. Claudia said, “Most of the husbands back then weren’t even that great. They drank, they beat their wives. But they were alive. That made all the difference.”

  “Come on, Claudia,” said Dana. “Your young Tomas would have taken out the garbage.”

  “I wouldn’t have let him,” said Claudia. “I would have done it myself, the way it’s meant to be done.”

  The ladies murmured.

  “Why are girls so picky in peaceful times? Lily, do you have a boyfriend?” asked Soo Min.

  “I had one, but we’re not together anymore.”

  “You see?” exclaimed Dana. “That’s what I’m talking about. So choosy. What was wrong with him?”

  “He didn’t love me.”

  A short quiet fell over the table then. But only short.

  “What’s not to love?” huffed Hannah, who loved Lily. “You’re a beautiful girl, even if you are much too skinny. So you two weren’t getting along. You should have tried harder. You just thought there were many other choices out there.”

  For him there were, Lily thought. All the way in upstate New York.

  “It’s not even the boyfriends,” Claudia said. “It’s the choices in everything. Here we have life, we’re affluent and what do we do? We can’t quit complaining…” Lily tuned out her grandmother’s voice. For sure Grandma watched too much CNN.

  Mock-glaring at her granddaughter, Claudia continued. “You know why? Because we’ve lived in peace so long. We’ve taken it all, taken and taken for fifty years and we don’t know how to stop. We don’t know what we have. We’ve never been invaded, this whole century we’ve never known bombing and suffering and privation, and famine and genocide. We live as if we’re going to live forever in peace, forgetting what three hundred thousand of our men have died for, what fifty five million people the world over have died for, forgetting what we fought for—”

  “The right to complain when we wish, right, Claudia?” said Soo Min. “Whining is our luxury. The right to complain, underappreciate, and disagree, and bitch and moan and gain weight and commit suicide and marry five times. The right to love our peaceful life and to take it all flagrantly for granted! To live as if we have infinite time. That’s not a bad thing. Better that than my youth. I had malaria, pellagra, dystrophy by the time I was Lily’s age. I thought I’d never make it out of my twenties. I didn’t give a whit about social programs or police brutality. I just wanted a hunk of meat.”

  “I was tattooed by the Nazis and had my skin nearly all burned off my body, inch by inch.”

  “I was raped on three separate occasions in Bulgaria by the advancing Russians. I could never have children because of it.”

  “I lost all my children and my parents in Sobibor. Here we grieve over the loss of one child. I lost all three of mine.”

  “My husband, my only heart, left for the war and never returned.”

  “I have cancer,” said Lily.

  And then everyone was mute, and this time for good.

  She couldn’t believe she was walking, by herself, moving, sitting, standing, going down the stairs. She couldn’t believe she was moving. Somehow the blood transfusion, somehow someone else’s platelets glued back together her bowels, her abdominal walls, her vena cava. She barely got to the garbage can on the corner of Court and Bergen before she threw up, in full view of the young couples coming home from their dinners on a Saturday night. Blood came out with the bile. She wiped her mouth and continued walking to the Brooklyn Public Library, open late in the evening for young girls who wanted to look up their disease.

  Her good life—her mother notwithstanding, her going broke notwithstanding. Her good childhood, her happy urban days. Her biking around Forest Hills Park, her college years, her passions, if one could call them that. Her slight painting, her small joys.

  And into this soft-around-the-edges and soft-in-the-center life comes a cancer cell.

  Why? One single cell, on steroids, a cell in the extreme, a baby blast cell, a single cell with granules in its cytoplasm enters Lily’s life while she’s still dancing and painting and dreaming of love and a future life. Why? Why the first one? What are these granules and where do they come from?

  But in a body of ten billion cells that divide and replicate and oxidize and catabolize, perhaps the question should be not why do they malfunction but why don’t they?

  The library has no answers to that one. It has info and statistics.

  The granulocyte divides and grows but doesn’t mature. It remains a baby blast cell, dividing into another and another and another. These immature neutrophils can’t do what they’re supposed to—plug up holes in her system. So Lily gets a cold. And keeps the cold. And thinks no more of it. So Lily bleeds. And keeps on bleeding. And in the meantime, the myeloid blasts divide and divide in the bone marrow, they spill over into her bloodstream. They’re stupid and large and they won’t die. They push and shove their way around her body, which has stopped producing red blood cells, which has fewer and fewer white blood cells. The cancer cells thicken her blood to heavy cream, then to treacle. She is like a poison candy inside. She is coagulant, she is syrup. Black syrup.

  And still she tries to work, to run, to walk, to stand, to lie down, and she lies on her back, and she thinks, what the FUCK is happening to me?

  Meanwhile cancer knows no lang
uage, does not speak English. The blasts, untutored in the dynamics of exclamation and declaration, just divide and divide and never die.

  Blast crisis. One cell to start. One errant, mutant death cell, and suddenly there are millions in her body and suddenly Lily is one of 10,600 new cases a year of AML. She is rare. She is unique. Most of the new cases are people over sixty. AML is an old person’s disease. Yet here she is, 24. Twenty-four. Lily’s porthole opened to acute myeloid leukemia.

  49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1

  And now the most important statistics.

  Death stats.

  The good news is that men die in greater numbers. Now for the not so good…AML causes a third of all deaths from leukemia. Acute myeloid leukemia has the lowest five year survival rate of all leukemias. The graphs are the worst. They offer Lily a seventeen percent chance of living after five years.

  Seventeen percent.

  And that’s the number door she picked. 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.

  She scratched out those numbers with a lead pencil on a pink piece of paper, and paid one dollar for the privilege of getting cancer. Lily Quinn, which door would you like, the lady, the tiger, door number one, door number two or door number cancer!

  She is getting nowhere with this. For solace she will try international comparisons.

  Ah. There you go. Lily is lucky to be living in the United States. For females the highest survival rates for leukemia are Australia and the U.S. Perhaps she should move to Australia. Warm weather, green ocean, and the best chance of surviving the granulocytes. Bring on the great white sharks, thinks Lily. She’ll take her chances in the infested Australian waters.

  It’s a good thing she is not living in Iceland. Really bad for women in Iceland. Or the British Isles. No cold islands for Lily. The bundled-up people can’t feel their bodies, they think they’re just hibernating and don’t notice something is wrong until it’s too late.

  You mean unlike her? Unlike her, who at the first sign of trouble ran to the doctor and said, doc, I’m sleeping all the time, do you think it’s leukemia? How long had her blood been a candy apple in the making and she didn’t notice?

  When Lily sees her grandmother next, she must thank her for choosing America after the Death March (1945) and the refugee camps in Belgium (1949). The statistics in America, no matter how bad, are still better than anywhere else.

  Grandma would be proud of her. That’s a good way to describe many things in the United States.

  Days and days, months and months, the leaves, the flowers have grown and soon will be dying. There had been no barbecues this past summer, no family get-togethers. Amy had taken her ID out of her pockets, her credit cards, the keys to her house, and placed them on top of her dresser, neat, orderly, meant to be there. She walked out of the house and was gone, days and weeks and months, and Lily never asked. Andrew hadn’t called her, hadn’t spoken to her since Maui, and Lily never asked. She couldn’t stand up, she couldn’t eat, her legs numb, her burn infected, she was wounded from the inside out, and she never asked herself why. And now she sleeps and dreams of her oblivion and desperately wishes for it again. To lead a life so wholly happy, so wholly unexamined that she could be dying, could be betrayed, could be besieged on all sides and never even know it.

  21

  Just Another Saturday Night for Spencer

  Spencer sat in front of his Saturday night special—magnificent and rare Speyside Malt Whisky. He didn’t work on the weekends—though sometimes, like today, he could not avoid it—and he did not see Mary, citing either work or family obligations, but the truth was, even his ailing father could not lure him for long away. When there was a family function he had to prepare himself in advance. He would take sick days and vacation days ahead of time, sometimes after. His body counted the five days from Monday to Friday as if they were a metronome, a pendulum of sobriety. Five days to be sober, and by Friday his body could barely function. He could not eat, he could not be merry, his mind clouded, his body a tremor. On Fridays he would sometimes go out with the guys from Homicide, and he would begin drinking with them, drinking cheap-ass stuff neat and small to show everyone how normal he was, how jolly, how much like them, killing two birds with one stone: showing faux sociability and starting his weekend reward. He preferred going out with Mary on Thursdays, but it was hard to avoid seeing your girlfriend on both weekend days. She was bound to get suspicious. Either you broke up with her, or you kept her and paid your price. So Spencer kept her and took her out Fridays, ending up at her apartment on the Upper West Side. He never stayed over, thinking of only one thing—going—even as he was coming.

  He was very well trained, he bought his drink ahead of time and from different stores, for since he drank until there was not a drop of Scotch in the house he became too ill-behaved and erratic to go out during. Too many people knew him around the neighborhood. He didn’t want them to see him in such need. He was a senior NYPD detective-lieutenant. He had to be operational, he had to be in control, hence the whisky-buying in Chelsea or Soho, hence the grumpy sobriety Monday to Friday, hence the careful drinking around his friends. He did not know of Saturdays. Most Saturdays were lost days, gone days, by all definitions of reality nonexistent days for Spencer. By Sunday morning all the Macallan and Chivas or Johnny Walker and Glenmorangie, and even the best, 25-year-old Highland Park, was gone and he remained home and confined and by necessity got slowly and painfully sober.

  Then came Monday again and five days of being good, five days of penance. Five days of living for the weekend. Spencer liked Mary, he needed Mary, he liked work, he needed work, but there was nothing Spencer needed as badly as a drink on Friday night.

  Why did his mother have so many children? Why couldn’t he have been an only Irish Catholic child? The weekends he had to stay sober for communions, confirmations, baptisms, weddings were torture to him. Actual torture. His body, dehydrated and throbbing, was expressing outwardly its internal malcontents. He was sullen, silent, and shaking. He never drank a sip at the gathterings, because he knew there was no way to drink without eventually drinking to blackout. There was no way to take one sip, one glass, one beer, one cocktail. Spencer never fooled himself, never deluded himself, never pretended. He knew the truth fully and accepted it fully, but it was more important that others did not know, didn’t even suspect, than it was for him to casually wet his throat with his drug of choice. So he didn’t drink but drummed out the dry hours on his fingers, on his napkins, on the tines of his fork.

  After he returned from Port Jeff and dropped off Harkman, and signed in the patrol car, and came home, Spencer without even taking off his shoes drank 70cl of Glenmorangie, while standing by the sink, straight from the bottle.

  He had a long shower to wash the drink out of his pores, and was now, hours later and a quarter sober, sitting in front of the carefully placed full bottle of Macallan and the accompanying highball glass. It was after midnight, and Spencer was wondering if he could throw it away and not drink from it. He tried watching TV, opening a newspaper. What to do with the afflictions? Just go on, try to go on, try to function in a world which has no patience for tremors, for weakness. He would lose his job in Missing Persons, he would be placed on disability and then retired from the force if Whittaker thought he was not in control of his life. Gabe McGill didn’t know, though if he knew, he wouldn’t have cared. If Harkman knew, Spencer would have been out of a job long ago. Perhaps this was what Harkman was threatening him with?

  This Saturday there was something else as Spencer sat in front of his bottle and contemplated his eternal conflict and struggled with himself in his losing battle. Tonight he thought of Lily. He thought of the girl with doe eyes and spiky hair, the wisp of a very young woman being taken down by things far worse than elective addictions, though Spencer wanted to say in his own feeble defense that there was nothing elective about his addiction.

  He wasn’t contemplating the bottle in relation to Lily’s sickness. He was contemplating himself in relatio
n to Lily. She needed him yesterday—and by luck he was with another woman, and was therefore sober. But tomorrow? And the next weekend? If she needed him again, he would not be there. He would not be able to pick up the phone, answer her page, come over, help her. She would call him, and he would not reply. She would ask him where he’d been and he would not respond.

  And there was no question about it—he couldn’t deny it, even to himself in his dark apartment in front of his solace, his soul, his spirit. Lily needed someone.

  Maybe just this one Saturday, this one Sunday, he thought, finally and with effort getting up. I’ll hang on for six more days. Think of it as an unexpected, protracted family function. Before he could talk himself out of it, Spencer went and poured the bottle of $93.06 whisky into the sink, grasping the stainless steel side while bending over to inhale the fermented barley mash’s intoxicating iodine scent as it swirled down the merciless drain.

  22

  In the Garden of the Barber Cop

  Through the ebony sleep, the phone, the phone rings, rings, insists on itself, on its rights in her life, pick me up, answer me, now, come, come, COME.

  Lily crawled out of bed and yanked the cord out of the wall. Tomorrow she was going to the hospital. Grandma must have called everybody. Well, that’s good. At least Lily didn’t have to. She wasn’t going to waste her time talking on the phone. But maybe she should talk to someone—who would take her to the hospital in the morning to admit her to begin her chemo?

  She wondered if Grandma called her mother.

  I hope so. I can’t call her. She talks, complains, hurts, aggresses, pushes toward a conflict I don’t want to give her, but finally I scream at her, I turn into the ugly thing she wants me to be, and hate myself. Well, I don’t want to blame my mother anymore for the person I am when I am with her. Joshua, bless him and his mother complex, cured me of that. I choose to become someone else, but to do that, I can’t speak to her. I can’t be drawn in to what I don’t want to be. I’m not calling her.