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“Everything is fine, great even. I was getting the jitters, you know, having worked non stop for forty-five years. Well, you wouldn’t know. But someday you’ll work.”
“I work now. Fifty hours a week. Papi, what’s going on? Talk to me.”
“Nothing to talk about. Do you know your mother has been coming to the beach with me every single morning? She loves it. She wasn’t feeling well when you were here. She is much better now. And she is cutting down on her smoking. She is looking beautiful, by the way, your mother.”
Allison came back on the line, and both she and George were on the phone now, clucking, joking, chuckling. “Lily, this is like a second honeymoon with your father,” her mother whispered. “I can’t tell you how happy we are.”
Could Lily hang up fast enough? She didn’t think so.
Now she had the strength to call Amy’s mother!
The voice on the other line was groggy and slightly slurred.
“Oh, Lily,” said Mrs. McFadden. “Where is she? Where is Amy? Why haven’t we heard from her?”
Lily wanted to say a few hollow words, and did, petering off, trailing off, she wanted to say more, about how she wasn’t worried—which was less and less true—and about how Amy liked to be independent and she hated accounting to anyone for her actions. (“That’s so true,” said Amy’s mother.) She said that she would call as soon as Amy came back, but she said it feebly, and it didn’t matter anyway, it wasn’t heard over Mrs. McFadden’s crying. There was no getting through to the mother, just as Lily had suspected, and she didn’t have anything in her arsenal with which to get through. Maybe Amanda would know how. After all, she had four children. Maybe if one of them went missing she would know what to say to Mrs. McFadden, who had had Amy with her first husband and was now remarried with two brand new children. She must have thought she was so close to not having to worry about Amy anymore.
Jan continued to cry, and Lily continued to sit on the phone and not know what to say except an intermittent and impotent, “I’m really sorry.”
Paul and Rachel, who were Amy’s friends and whose nucleus was Amy, wanted to talk only about—Amy. The conversation with Paul inevitably went something like this:
“Lil, where do you think she is?”
“I don’t know. What about you?”
“Have no idea. But then I didn’t live with her, I don’t know her everyday habits.”
“Paul, I might know how many times a day Amy brushes her teeth but I don’t know where she’s gone to.”
“I understand. No one is blaming you, Lil. Why so defensive?”
“Because everybody seems to think I have answers that I just don’t have. You don’t know how often that detective asks me where she is.”
“Where do you think she is?”
“I don’t know!”
“Do you think something happened to her?”
“No! Like what?”
And with Rachel:
“God, Lil, what do you think happened to Amy?”
“I don’t know. What about you?”
“I have no idea. But then, I didn’t live with her.”
Lily formulated her doubts. “Rach, the detective told me you told him that Amy was definitely seeing somebody.”
“That’s what she told me. Don’t you know? I thought you’d confirm for sure. Who was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you not know?”
“She didn’t tell me, Rachel.”
“Why would she keep something like that from you? I thought you were close.”
“We were close. We are close.”
“By the way … is the detective married?”
“I don’t know. Why would I know that? And what do you care? How is TO-nee?”
“Tony is great,” Rachel said cryptically. “Never better.”
“So what are you asking about the detective for then?”
“No reason.”
Lily fell back on Amy’s bed. Did she have the answers? Should she have the answers? That was even worse. Should she and just doesn’t because Lily Quinn doesn’t have the answers to anything? Not to why she hasn’t graduated in six years, not to what she wants to do with her life, not to what’s wrong with her mother, not to just what it is that Joshua can’t love about her, not to where Amy is. Not to 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
MISSING: Amy McFadden
DESCRIPTION:
Sex: Female
Race: Caucasian
Age: 24
Height: 5'8"
Weight: 140 lbs.
Build: Medium
Complexion: Fair
Hair: Red, long, curly
Eyes: Brown
Clothing/Jewelry: Unknown.
Last seen: May, 1999, in the vicinity of Avenue C and 9th Street in Manhattan, New York, within the confines of the 9th Precinct.
Lily and Rachel and Paul walked around the neighborhood and tacked the 8½ by 11 posters with Amy’s photo on the lamp posts of every block from 12th Street down to 4th and on three avenues, A, B, and C. Lily couldn’t help but be reminded of thumbtacking her lottery ticket to her wall, and every time she thought of it she felt stabbed a little in the chest, and walked on to the next lamp post without raising her head, careful not to look at her friends, nor at the homeless on the stoops who gazed at them from underneath their rags. Paul tied shiny yellow ribbons above the posters. Amy missing. 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1. Amy missing. 49, 45, 39, 24, 18, 1.
7 (#ulink_8215354d-9ca7-5880-aa11-ca0392c9df99)
Birds of Paradise (#ulink_8215354d-9ca7-5880-aa11-ca0392c9df99)
Allison showed up for their new conjugal bliss of a honeymoon three days straight. She went to the beach with him gladly the first day, reluctantly the second day, and on the third morning with hostility, complaining about the wetness of the water, and the sandiness of the sand, and the sunniness of the sun, and the steepness of the hill, complaining about his shoes, which as far as he could see weren’t bothering her. Complaining about the omelet he had yet to make (“I’m sick of your omelets.”) and the coffee (“You never make enough.”).
The fourth morning she didn’t get out of bed, telling him in a mumbled voice that she had had a late night and needed to sleep. The fifth morning, she said she wasn’t feeling well. Her legs hurt from all the walking. She was developing corns and calluses on her feet. She was getting a chill from the cold (??? 79ºF!) water so early in the morning. Her bathing suit was dirty and needed to be washed. The towels weren’t dry and she wasn’t going without the towels.
“Allie, want to go to the beach?”
“No. How many beaches can we go to? I’ve seen them.”
“You’ve seen a volcanic beach?”
She paused. “Sand and water, right?”
“No, volcanic pebbles.”
“You want me to walk barefoot on rocks? Don’t you remember how I cut my foot?”
“Allie, let’s go, for an hour.”
“I’m not going. I have to put the towels in the dryer, they’ll smell if I don’t. Why don’t you go?”
“I don’t want to go by myself.”
“Well, I’m not going.”
George went by himself.
How about Hamoa Beach with gray sand and 4000-foot-high cliffs hanging over the ocean?
“Gray sand? I’m supposed to be tempted by that?”
George went by himself.
Big Beach, Wailea Beach, Black Sand Beach?
“Big Beach, just bigger than ours? And black sand? That’s attractive. Now white sand beach on the Gulf of Mexico, that’s attractive, that’s nice. It doesn’t get hot, and it’s so fine, it’s like flour. Why didn’t we get a condo in Florida?”
“Because you said there were too many storms and it was too hot and humid.”
“I never said that, never. It would have been a beautiful life.”
George went by himself.
Lahaina, the Road to Hana, the rainforest?
“You want me to go see trees, George? Walk along the road and into the trees? Poland had forests. And roads. Is it going to rain in the rainforest? I don’t think so.”
George went by himself. Allison came with him to Lahaina once because there was shopping in Lahaina.
“Maui, the god of sun, the cursed god of sun. He cursed this place with perpetual long days of sunshine,” said Allison.
George tried a different tactic.
“What about if we go to the mainland, Allie? Let’s fly to San Francisco, and we’ll drive down south to Las Vegas. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Something hot, yes. Do you have any idea what the temperature is in Las Vegas in July? It’s a hundred and twenty degrees. And what are we going to do, rent a car? We can’t afford such an expense. You’re retired now, George.”
He suggested bringing their own car on a ship to San Francisco.
“What, our car, with no AC, in July? We’ll suffocate before we leave California. Look, get it out of your head. I’m not going to the mainland in the summer. You know I don’t feel well, I can’t be traveling in such heat with all my problems. It’ll set me back ten years.”
He suggested making plans to go in the fall when the weather became cooler. He was playing on her love of the slots. On her love of getting dressed up and like a proper civilized person giving her money away willingly and happily to a small steel machine.
Viva! Las Vegas.
But she couldn’t face the thought of traveling anywhere with George, of spending every waking moment with him and sleeping moment, too, for they could hardly get two hotel rooms, could they? The thought of not having a room of her own to retire to where she could close the door, and when no one would see her, was too difficult even as a thought to Allison. She couldn’t imagine it, how could she ever live it?
“Would you stop pestering me already! What’s this compulsion with always going, going, going? Why can’t you sit still for a moment? And if you wanted your beloved continent so much, why did we buy a condo in Maui, then, huh? Why did you push me to buy one here?”
George reminded her she was the one who had wanted to live in Maui.
“Oh, that’s right, blame it all on me. Well, fine, we’re here, and I’m paying plenty for this condo, I’m not leaving it for three months to go somewhere else. What an idiotic waste of money. You always were a spendthrift. That’s why you don’t have any money now.”
Slowly, very slowly, he suggested selling the condo and moving back east. To North Carolina, perhaps, where there was fishing and gardening, and seasons, and lakes—where his brother lived.
“We just got here and you want to move already? You’re sick, that’s what you are. You need professional help, why can’t you be happy anywhere, why? It’s beautiful here, what the hell is wrong with you? You have too much time on your hands, that’s your problem.”
And then she started falling down.
After the first time she fell, he asked her about it, and she said, “Cough syrup. Haven’t you been paying any attention to what’s going on with me? I’m very sick.” She coughed for emphasis.
“Maybe if you left the apartment once for five minutes in a whole month, you’d feel better.”
“Oh, that’s great! Go ahead, scream at a sick woman!”
The next morning when George came back from his constitutional walk and swim at eight-thirty, she had fallen again in the sunken living room.
“It’s my osteoporosis,” she said later. “My knees buckle. They don’t bend anymore like they used to.”
He found her on the floor clutching the mail in her hands.
“The cough syrup,” Allison told him. “Mixed with antidepressants. The doctor said it’s a very dangerous combination. I could die.”
