Lily dropped her cup of tea. She didn’t even bend down to clean it up. “What did you say?” she whispered. She couldn’t have been sunk farther down into the back of that couch, slunk down, stooped, lowered, debased. “My mother is your husband’s youngest sister?”
“That’s right.”
“Grandma…” Lily couldn’t take the hands away from her mouth. Her grandmother, who raised her, who adored her, who took care of her, who was the family’s only matriarch, was not her mother’s mother!
After five minutes of a trance-like silence, her grandmother continued in a lowered voice. “I wish I could tell you that Tomas’s father was your mother’s father, but I’m afraid no one thought so, not even the father himself. Hence all those nasty rumors about his wife. Everybody suspected she became pregnant on one of her excursions to Danzig while begging for the drink.
“The baby was born in the dead of winter, in Danzig, during one of her trips. When my father and mother found them, both were nearly frozen, the naked baby wrapped in her coat and skirts.
“Believe it or not, as if by a miracle, after the baby was born, she sobered up. All the cows were long eaten, all the goats were eaten, there was no milk, and no one else was having babies. There were no wet nurses. Someone had to feed the infant or she would die.”
Numbly, dumbly, mutely, Lily stared at her grandmother. “Grandma…her mother’s name…was Anya, or something like that? Anna? Anika?…Anne?”
“That’s right,” Grandma said, frowning. “How do you know?”
“I don’t know,” Lily said inaudibly. That remarkable Spencer. Saw even then, at the very beginning, something, everything. Saw without knowing, simply saw a shape of Anne with his own damaged heart.
“Your mother must have acquired a taste for that vodka in the womb and later while being nursed,” said Claudia. “You think I don’t know, but I know everything, Lily. The way your mother is and has been—I don’t think it was milk pouring from Anya’s teat into her baby’s mouth.”
“Grandma, please…”
“The sobriety lasted exactly until the weaning. Then Anya would take Olenka and disappear to Danzig, using the baby to beg for vodka. Interestingly she had enough sense to not get drunk in the city, like before. She would come back to Skalka, leave Olenka with me and go off into the woods with her bottle, like a bear.” Grandma collected her thoughts. Lily was coiled up on the couch. “Once or twice my own mother and I had to go to Danzig to bring them back. We’d find Anya cold on the ground, in an alley and Olenka would be sitting by her, not moving, every once in a while saying Mama, Mama.”
“Grandma, I can’t. I just can’t.” Lily put her hands over her ears. Grandma was right. At twenty-five, she was just a child who could not bear this.
“I’m sorry. That’s why we didn’t tell you for so long.”
“I would have happily lived out what’s left of my life without ever knowing,” breathed out Lily. “Had I known, I never would have asked, never. So is my mother Jewish? Am I Jewish?”
“Well, no.”
“No?”
“You know you are christened Catholic. And we christened your mother. We had to christen her.”
“Why had to?”
“Because at the end of 1942 all the Jews in the village were moved to the Warsaw Ghetto.”
“So my mother and her mother were taken to the ghetto?”
“Oh, Lily.”
“Don’t ‘Oh Lily’ me now, Grandma. You’re so far down into the precipice, there’s no way back.”
“In December 1942 the Germans came to our house, and said all Jews had to leave immediately for the train to Warsaw. The woman with the yellow band and her child had to go. At that moment Anya laughed very loud, shoved Olenka away from herself, and said, ‘My child? She’s not my child. I wouldn’t have a child, I have four grown sons, I’m forty-five years old, do I look to you like I’m capable of having a child?’ She grabbed the girl and thrust her in my arms, and said, ‘I can’t take care of it for you anymore, Klavdia, do you hear? No more!’ She turned to the Germans and said, ‘It’s her child, look! It looks exactly like her. I’ve been helping her a little bit because she is so young and doesn’t know anything about children, and I’ve been using the girl to help me get the vodka I need. I’m a drunk, you see. I’ve been stealing her from them to beg for vodka. Isn’t that true? Tell them, Klavdia.’ I didn’t know what to say. I said, ‘That’s right.’ The Germans looked at me and said, ‘This is your baby?’
“I was light-haired then, and so was your mother, she was light blonde, while Anya was dark-haired and dark-eyed. The hair saved Olenka because aside from the blonde-dark contrast, she was really a carbon copy of her mother. They had the same face, the same features. But the Germans believed Anya and took her with them, and left Olenka with me.” Grandma began to cry. Lily had never seen her grandmother cry; it frightened her. “When they took her mother, the child in my arms ripped herself free, and shouted, ‘Mama!’
“The Nazis turned around, and I grabbed her and held her to me very tight, smothering her, covering her face, and said, ‘Shh, shh, it’ll be all right. Mama is here, right here, baby.’ You know, I don’t think they believed me, I remember the way they were looking at me, at the baby. But they left the girl with me. And for the next three days Olenka sat by our frosted-over window waiting for her mother to come back.”
The two women sat side by side on the couch, not speaking, not touching. The house was quiet except for Lily’s anguished crying.
“Did we ever find out what happened to Anya?” she asked.
“No. I suspect it was what happened to all the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.”
It was a long time before Lily could speak again. Finally, she got up, said she had to be going. Thanked her grandmother for a cup for tea, for an enjoyable afternoon. She said she was going to call her tomorrow, tell her how her blood work turned out. And before she left, at the open door, with her voice breaking, Lily said, “Grandma, I think my mother is still sitting in that crying room, by that window.”
Lily walked not to the F train, but in the other direction to the New York Harbor, and sat on the bench for a long time on the Promenade on the East River overlooking the mouth of the Hudson and all of Manhattan Island. It must be getting so late. Is DiAngelo even there this late? It’s four o’clock. I might as well go home. Wait till Spencer hears. I can’t even remember what I’m supposed to do anymore. My poor mother.
62
Lindsey
That night, Lily did something she could not remember doing since she didn’t know when. She called her mother in Maui.
Her father answered. Her mother was back home, but she was not feeling well at the moment, she was sleeping; no, no, everything was fine, she really was just sleeping, nothing more. It’s been very good. She’s been going seven times a week to AA meetings. They had the meetings on the green lawns in front of the blue ocean for an hour a day. “Your mother is doing great. Shelly is so proud of her.”
That Shelly was nothing but a troublemaker. “Well, tell her I called, won’t you?”
“I will. She’ll be happy to hear you called, Liliput.”
When she hung up the phone, Spencer was looking at her. “She’s still going every day,” Lily said to him. “So there.”
He said nothing, just opened his arms to her.
Lily tried painting the frosted window in Skalka, Poland, but ended up sobbing onto the canvas on the floor, and all the blue frost became gray blobs and dried with a briny texture like the dried-out sea.
In the comfort of her bed, Spencer heard about Olenka Pevny, and Lily heard about John Doe.
Then they slept, woke up in the middle of the night, tried to deal with things.
“Spencer, so is this person definitely Milo?”
“He is. I spoke to Clive, showed him the drawing you did. He recognized the eyes. You can’t hide your crystal meth eyes. I showed it to Paul as well, but he didn’t know him.”
“Well, how are we going to find him?”
“We? You are going to do nothing except go see DiAngelo in the morning. I am going to go see Jan McFadden tomorrow but alone—without Gabe, so as not to scare her. Maybe she can identify the mystery man from Amy’s past—though I have my doubts. I’ve already talked to her until I’m blue in the face. She has no idea what her daughter had got up to.”
“Talk to her again, Spence. Use your finely tuned interrogation skills.”
“I’ll show you finely tuned.” Spencer kissed her prominent clavicle bones, all across.
Struggling to stick to the subject, Lily said, “I’m convinced this Milo is the reason that Amy is missing.” She closed her eyes and moaned lightly under his mouth.
Still in her robe, unshowered, unhappy even to talk, Jan said to Spencer, “Why do you keep coming back here if you don’t have any information about my daughter?”
“Jan, I have a drawing here of a homeless man that Amy used to be friendly with. Do you recognize this man? I hoped you might know his name.”
Jan glanced at the sketch of Milo Spencer was showing her. “Well, I certainly don’t know his name. I don’t recognize him. Do you have him in custody?”
“No. We’ve got an APB out for him. He’s known as Milo. If we find him, I think we might find out where Amy is.”
“Well, I don’t know any homeless men! I can’t believe Amy would either; not my Amy.”
“Her friend Paul said Amy was friendly with a lot of off-the-track people he didn’t know.” Spencer put the sketch away.
“You asked me this already! I didn’t know them either!”
“Right. But perhaps—you knew somebody?”
“No matter how many times you ask me, I still won’t know.”
Jan stubbed out her cigarette. “Are they even looking in Central Park anymore?” she said emptily.
Spencer didn’t reply. They weren’t. The police had searched for a year, combing 843 acres of wooded terrain and, having found nothing suspicious, finally stopped last month.
Jan asked if he wanted a drink.
“Coffee.”
“Coffee if you want. I meant—”
“No, thank you.”
“Just so I don’t drink alone.”
“No.”
If only anyone but the demons knew with what effort Spencer’s lips formed the words no. They didn’t even form them. He managed to shake his head while his lips went dry.
He waited, thinking of something else to ask, while she stared grimly into her glass of Chivas, while he stared grimly into her glass of Chivas.
He asked if Amy belonged to any clubs. Sports? Art? Choir?
Jan said choir.
“Any political clubs? Did she run for student council? The treasurer? The president? Was she in young conservatives of America club?”
“Choir, I told you. Nothing political.”
“Did she vote?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know, darling,” said Jim. He had walked into the kitchen earlier, still sweaty from running, and was fixing himself a drink of ice water as he listened. “She voted in the ‘92 election when she was a senior in high school.”
Jan McFadden looked stupefied. “Did she? I know nothing about that. She was in choir. She sang. She was creative, artistic. She may have voted, but politics didn’t interest her.”
Well, they must have interested her a little bit, if she came in to see Andrew Quinn, thought Spencer. He wanted to say that to Jan, but didn’t see the point, she seemed pretty high-strung as it was.
Jim said, “Maybe if you stop with the Chivas in the morning, you’d be able to recall a few more things that would help this man find your daughter.”
“Oh, stop it! You don’t think if I could help him, I would? If I knew anything!”
Spencer stepped into the breach.
“Did Amy know…Congressman Quinn…back then?” asked Spencer carefully.
“Of course not! God, what are you getting at? I don’t even think she voted for him. She was so uninvolved. What are you getting at?”
“What I need from you is a single name: one of the people she traveled with, hung with, went out with? A name of a boyfriend, anything.” God!
“I told you a thousand times, I don’t know! I forgot, or I never knew. Amy’s senior year, I had two small babies in the house to take care of. And she was eighteen! I mean, honestly.” Jan sat, nearly crying. “I don’t remember. It was seven years ago. With everything that’s happened, I’m surprised I can remember my own name.”
“A single name. A first name of anyone you let your oldest child, your daughter, go traveling across America in a van with.”
“Let her, who let her? I didn’t let her! She just went. I wanted her to go to college.”
“One name.”
“Truth is,” said Jim suddenly, “you didn’t want to know. Tell the detective. Amy was wild, she constantly disobeyed, screamed back at you. You washed your hands of her. You had the twins, you didn’t want to be thinking about Amy. When she said she was going traveling across the U.S., you told her never to come back, as if you were glad to be rid of her. You as much as kicked her out when you heard she wasn’t going to college.”
“I didn’t kick her out!” Jan shouted.
“That’s why you don’t know. You didn’t want to know. You didn’t care!”
“Lindsey!” Jan cried.
Spencer stepped back against the counter. LINDSEY!
Panting and lowering her voice, Jan said, “Lindsey was one of the girls she used to hang out with.”
Well, well. “Lindsey what?”
“You wanted a first name, I gave you a first name. Lindsey.”
“This Lindsey lived…?”
“Down the road somewhere, here in Port Jeff Village.” In a quieter voice still, and after a significant pause, Jan said, “Detective, if there’s nothing else, do you mind…I’m very tired. I need to lie down.”
Jim followed Spencer out to the car. “I’m sorry about her.”
“Don’t worry.”
“She can’t see straight.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this, man. I’m at the end of my rope.”
“You should do this for a little longer,” Spencer said. “She needs you.”
In New York City on 22nd Street at the hair salon, Paul said Lindsey? Lindsey who? Not Lindsey Kiplinger? I didn’t think Amy was friendly with her, she was a year above her in school, and besides, I only know of her because she’s dead, died a few years back in a car wreck or something, somewhere out west. New Mexico? Utah?
Spencer called the Kiplingers in Port Jeff. Their message machine said they were away on vacation.
Back at the station there was a message from DiAngelo.
“Are you busy?” DiAngelo said, when Spencer called back. “I know it’s the middle of the day. But Lily needs someone with her, and I’ve got to get her transferred to Sloan Kettering.”
“I’ll come. Sloane Kettering? What’s wrong?”
“She’s very sick, Detective O’Malley.”
“Well, I know, but…”
“She’s dying.”
63
A Terminal Degree in Cancer Treatment
“Lily, where have you been?”
“I thought we were on a two-week test schedule.”
“I haven’t seen you for a month!”
“I meant to come but then I was in Maui and then I was…” I was too busy living for cancer. “So tell me?” She paused. “Are things not so good?”
“Things aren’t so good.”
She held her breath a moment, two. “How not good? It’s only been three weeks.”
“It’s been four. And before that you weren’t improving, you were holding.”
“All right. And now?”
DiAngelo said nothing.
“Is it back?”
“It’s back.”
“Is my b
lood black caviar again?”
He didn’t say anything.
Four weeks of induction, thirteen weeks of consolidation, one of pneumonia, six more of maintenance with radical new leukemia treatment that was supposed to attack only the cancer cells and leave the rest unchanged, twelve months of my life, of Spencer’s life, of Amy’s life, of my family’s life and after that effort, the doctor says nothing.
Lily sat silently in DiAngelo’s office. “Well, now what? Consolidation chemo again?”
“No, the blastocytes are immune.”
“Immune to chemo?”
“Yes. They were obviously immune to Alkeran.”
“So what’s left?”
“Well, there are two more things we can do.”
Why did Lily feel so suddenly incapable of listening to him? What was happening to her? Her hands started to shake.
“I want you to have an open mind about this. It’s not an easy thing after all you’ve been through. But I told you from the beginning this was going to be a tough fight.”
“Yes, yes, you’ve covered yourself admirably.”
“I wasn’t covering myself. I wanted you to know the truth. Didn’t you want that?”
“You know, Doctor D.?” Lily said. “I’m finding out little by little that, as it turns out, the less truth the better.” She got up on unsteady legs.
“Come on, you don’t mean it.” He came around his table to where she was standing, ready to go, and put his arm around her. “Didn’t I tell you that it wants you to give up first? But I don’t want you to give up first.”
“No.”
“You have become my personal crusade. It’s not going to lick us, Lily. Now sit.”
But she couldn’t sit. She wanted to go. She just couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t take it alone in his office, sitting in his chair, telling her that there were only two more things they could do.
She couldn’t listen. “Can I use your—can I just—”
And in the bathroom, Lily leaned facing the wall, her head pressed to the cool white tile, eyes closed. Her palms were pressed against the wall also. She slid down to her knees, breathing, breaking, so hard, so shallow, catching her losing breath, her forehead against the cold tiles. Please, take this cup from me.
The Girl in Times Square Page 43