LITMIR.BIZ

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when she woke up with the sun peeking promise through her room darkening blankets, time mocked her the most.

8

       The Disadvantages of Walking to Work

      Spencer was outside Lily’s door. It was the end of June. She was wearing her work uniform—black pants and white shirt. Her short hair was slicked back and still wet.

      “Detective … if Amy comes back, don’t you think you’ll be the first one I’ll call?”

      “I don’t know, will I be?”

      “Isn’t there some other vice in this city besides missing persons? Isn’t anyone committing crimes out there? I know the mayor’s ‘Clean Up New York’ program has been a considerable success, but there must be something else for you to do.” They turned the corner and continued walking down Avenue C.

      “There isn’t.” He looked dispirited. “These missing person cases …”

      “Is this a standard case, then?” Lily wished she hadn’t said that. It sounded so flip. What if he said yes? Yes, this is just one of our regular, run-of-the-mill, nothing-special-about-it cases. In one month it won’t be a case anymore. It will be a statistic. Lily shivered in the heat. Why did she ask?

      But Spencer to his credit said, “Amy is not a standard case.” And when Lily was afraid to look at him, lest she see the lying in his eyes and he see the skepticism in hers, he repeated, “Really. She is not. Missing person cases are in many cases misunderstandings. Someone moves away and doesn’t leave a forwarding address. Or someone goes for that planned two week trip to Europe and decides to stay for three months. Or the teenager runs away with her boyfriend whom her mother forbids her to see. The family hires a private eye, and with luck finds them in two weeks.”

      “There’s no private eye for Amy.” Lily said that wistfully.

      “Oh, but there is.”

      She stopped walking and looked at him in surprise.

      “Jan McFadden is paying for him. Lenny, the muckwader, sacked after twenty years on the force. We sacked him, now suddenly he’s indispensable.”

      “Is he a gumshoe, Detective O’Malley?” Gumshoe was such a funny word.

      “Gumshoe is one way to describe him. He is an unhealthy version of my partner, with less fashion sense. Lenny hasn’t turned up anything. And that’s saying something because Lenny trudges up dirt we don’t even ask for.” Spencer paused. “Lenny is … shall we say, a bottom dweller.”

      “Oh. Well, that’s good then. Amy is obviously not at the bottom.”

      “Who knows? She’s made herself impossible to trace. But don’t you see, in the discarded identification is everything. She didn’t leave her identity behind every time she went out. You said so yourself. Sometimes she left it, you said. When Amy left the apartment without ID, it meant one of two things: either she was trying to protect herself, or she was trying to protect whoever she was with.”

      Lily was quiet. “She wasn’t that calculating. Maybe she’s working somewhere. What about a check of some kind, Social Security maybe?

      “Last Social Security entry dates back to the second week in May, when the tax was taken out of her paycheck at the Copa Cobana.”

      He had already been so thorough. “Anything else to check?”

      Without looking at her, Spencer said, “In New York State there have been no reports of deceased unidentified young women either in hospitals, morgues or funeral parlors. There have been no reports of unidentified young women found in crashed cars, train wrecks or public parks. And believe me, we have men combing through every bush around the Central Park reservoir. It should only take us another three or four years to search every acre.”

      She was storming for other ideas, trying to be helpful, walking briskly. Lafayette Street never seemed so far away. He walked alongside her. “Maybe,” said Lily, her voice weakening with the slowing of her heart, “Amy doesn’t want to be found.”

      “Maybe,” said Spencer, “Amy wants to be found but can’t be.”

9

       Ignorance in Amy’s Bed

      Lily was awake at three in the morning. She was lying in Amy’s bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Amy, trying to trick her mind into not thinking about Amy. There was something bothering Lily terribly. She kicked off the covers, she spread her arms and legs, pretending to fly. Her limbs felt a peculiar aching, and her heart wasn’t letting go of the needles. A water faucet dripped in the bathroom; Lily could hear it clearly through the open door. She wanted to get up and close the door but couldn’t.

      Something was wrong inside her. Her weakness, her sadness, her exhaustion. Maybe Spencer was right, maybe she should go talk to somebody. But who?

      Lily could not go to sleep. An inner beast was gnashing its teeth on her spleen, sucking out her bone marrow—Oh God!

      Suddenly she jumped up off the bed. Where did she get the energy to do that? She was so tired. But she jumped out of bed and stood for a moment, panting, looking down at Amy’s quilt, Amy’s pillows, Amy’s sheets.

      She went into the bathroom and then into the kitchen to get some water. Afterward she sat cross-legged on the floor in her own empty bedroom and dialed 1-800-m-a-t-t-r-e-s, leaving the last S off for savings. In fifteen minutes, at four in the morning, she bought herself a full-size mattress with a frame, all for five hundred bucks—her last week’s earnings—and it was going to be delivered just hours later at eleven. What a country.

      After she hung up with the bed people, Lily lay on the futon in the living room/hallway and turned on the miserable middle-of-the-night TV, channel-surfed for a few nightmarish minutes—cream on your face, psychic on the 900 line, lose weight fast with our successful formula—then picked up the phone again and called the precinct. The night-time officer asked if it was an emergency, and she didn’t think it was, but she couldn’t be sure.

      “Detective O’Malley is not on call tonight, miss. I can tell him in the morning when he comes in that you called. Are you in trouble?”

      Lily thought she was. But to the officer she said no and, hanging up, lay on the futon, turning the sound off on the TV and staring at the flickering screen. She thought of calling the beeper number on his business card, but didn’t. Words from an almost forgotten Springsteen song kept going round in her head. Hey man, did you see that?/His body hit the street with such a beautiful thud/I wonder what the dude was sayin’/or was he just lost in the flood?

      She played around with the remote and adjusted the colors to black and white. Now she was watching the Psychic Network in black and white and as she stared into the TV all Lily kept thinking about was the weeks and weeks she had spent sleeping in Amy’s bed without ever bothering to get her own, as if she knew in her deepest, blackest heart that Amy was not coming back.

      They had plans to get jobs together. They were both artists, they both painted. Lily liked to paint people, she had a facility with faces and bodies. Amy liked to paint still life—chairs, pots, trees. They sketched together in Washington Square Park and in Union Square Park, and in Battery Park, and even in the homeless-addled, heroin-addled Tompkins Square Park. They sketched the nightlines of Broadway and Fifth Avenue and later painted in the colors. But in many sketches, particularly of late, Lily had been noticing that while she continued to add color where color was needed, Amy left her own work black and white, gray, tonal, uncolored. There were no yellows of street lights, no reds of traffic signs, no blues of police

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