When Lily struggled back to the window, the lady had a look in her eyes that said, well, well, this is how it all shakes out—given with one hand, taken away with the other. She became satisfied and pleasant. “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll make an exception, we’ll send the check by mail. Do you have a beneficiary? You have to put that on your claim form, a beneficiary name. You know, a husband, a child, a brother, a sister?”
“What’s your Social Security number, Spencer? I’d like you to sign as my witness. Go ahead. Sign. Right over here.” As they were walking out of a malodorous, unclean, badly lit lottery office, he gave her his arm. Gratefully she took it.
“Can I spend it all before Monday?” Lily said to him.
“I’m sure you can spend it all before Monday. What do you want to buy?”
“Another sixty years,” answered Lily feeling a pang of regret for her wasted summer.
After he dropped Lily off at home, Spencer sat in the car for fifteen minutes looking at his hands, and then went back to the precinct to pick up Harkman, who was grumpy about being called in to work on a Saturday, but it made no impression on Spencer, who was even grumpier. They drove out to Port Jefferson to have a more formal talk with Andrew Quinn, who turned out to be the grumpiest of all. Spencer felt there were some things the honorable congressman just didn’t have a chance to divulge during yesterday’s informal interview which had had to be cut short because of Lily. He was going to give him that chance now, to come clear.
“Come on, guys! On a Saturday? My whole family’s home.”
“I’m sorry, congressman,” said Spencer. “Procedure. We’ll keep it short.”
“Fine, but I’m not talking to you without my lawyer present,” said Andrew. And Miera, who came to the hall to stand beside him, said, “He’s definitely not talking to you without his lawyer present.”
Harkman shrugged at Spencer, who shrugged too and unhooked a pair of handcuffs from his belt. “Fine, if that’s how you want it. In that case, I will have to arrest you and take you in for formal questioning at our precinct. You have a right to an
attorney. You have the right to remain silent, for everything you say can, and will, be held against you.”
Andrew raised his hands. “Stop. Stop,” he said. “I will waive my right to a lawyer, if we can just settle this amicably right here.”
“Andrew! You cannot talk to them without your lawyer.”
“Be quiet, Miera! Go back to the family. Be calm. This way, gentlemen.”
“No, Andrew.”
“I said be quiet, Miera.”
In his office, Andrew sat calmly behind his desk while Spencer stood across from him. Spencer was too keyed up to sit.
Harkman stepped in before Spencer began. “Congressman, you can say what you want now, and you’re obviously saying it, but I know and you know what you said to me in that phone call. I asked you if you knew her and you said you didn’t.”
“No, I said, I didn’t recall, and I was obviously answering another question.”
“I asked if you knew her!”
“I didn’t hear you properly! And don’t raise your voice to me, I won’t stand for it.”
“Congressman, were you having an affair with Amy McFadden? Did you hear
that
question?” said Harkman.
“Yes, I heard, and no I wasn’t.”
“You did not in any way have a relationship with Amy that was outside of her friendship with your sister?”
“As I told Detective O’Malley, she may have come into my office here in Port Jeff. I don’t know, I don’t remember. She may have. Do you consider that outside the friendship with my sister?”
“What about your offices in D.C.?”
“No, she was never there.”
“That you’re sure about? That you recall?”
“She didn’t live in D.C., gentlemen. Obviously it’s easier for me to imagine—even though I have no recollection of it—that she could have come here.”
“When did you meet her?” Harkman asked.
“I met her through Lily.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. I can’t recall.”
Spencer was watching him very carefully. “There seem to be a lot of things you can’t recall.”
“About this girl, yes. I have a photographic memory about things that are important. I’m sorry she’s missing, I wish you well in your investigation. I want to help as much as I can, but I wasn’t friendly with her, and more to the point, I don’t know where she is.”
“Would you be willing to take a lie detector on this?”
“On what? Knowing her? Of course.”
“Not on knowing her. On having an improper relationship with her. On not knowing where she is at the moment.”
“Yes, we did not have an
improper
relationship.”
“Would you be willing to take a polygraph?”
“I am absolutely, one hundred percent willing, but I will have to consult with my lawyer on that one. I myself don’t see a problem with it.”
Spencer waited to speak, kept quiet, formulated his thoughts. To take the plunge or no?
Andrew tapped tensely on his desk with his fingers. “Listen, will that be all? Because I’ve got a houseful—”
“Congressman, you’ve been in the girls’ apartment.”
“As I told you.”
“Yes, you told me. But what you didn’t tell me,” said Spencer, “is that you spent most of your time inside Amy’s room. That’s where we found the hairs that match yours.”
Andrew stopped drumming, glancing from one detective to the other. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he finally said. “I don’t know how that could be.”
“No? Me neither.”
Harkman glanced at Spencer, who looked only at Andrew.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Andrew, and
his voice was slightly shaking. “These intimidation tactics won’t work on me, detective, and I’m going straight to your superiors to tell them how you are treating an innocent man.”
Spencer glanced at Harkman.
“Congressman, I don’t know what you’re getting so rattled about. I’m asking you to explain how not only your hairs but your fingerprints could have been found all over Amy’s room.”
Andrew sat. “I don’t know how. I didn’t go into Amy’s room.”
“Were they perhaps all over Amy?”
Harkman sat.
Spencer stood.
Finally Andrew, his hands unclasped, slumped back on the chair, and rubbed his face, as if he wanted to rub his eyes away. His demeanor faltered. “Look,” he said. “I’m not under arrest, I’m not under suspicion.. I don’t want to do anything to impede your investigation so I’m divulging information to you willingly.” He gathered himself for a long time before he spoke again.
“It is true…I have to admit…Amy and I
once
had a relationship that was not…entirely proper.” He clenched and unclenched his fists as Spencer, holding his breath, waited. “But it’s been over and done with a long time ago. We ended it and I haven’t seen her in months.”
Now Spencer sat down. Spencer and Harkman just stared at each other. The office was heavily quiet.
“Congressman,” Spencer said slowly, “you were involved with a girl who has vanished.”
“The two are not connected.”
“Congressman! Let me repeat—you have just told us you had an affair with a girl who has
vanished.
”
“I heard you! I know! But one is one thing, the other is the other. The affair, as you call it, ended. I haven’t seen her in months.”
“Well, that’s appropriate because she’s been missing for months. When did it end?”
“When did it end?”
“Why are you repeating my questions?”
“I can’t recall when.”
“Did it end two weeks ago? In July? In June? Are we playing twenty questions? When did it end?” Spencer hated raising his voice as if he were speaking to a misbehaving child.
“Detective, you’re hounding me.”
“You don’t know what hounding is. Wait until the newspapers get a hold of this. Now when did it end?”
Andrew rubbed his face. “Perhaps March. I can’t quite recall.”
“Why did it end?”
“Why? What can I tell you, it ran its course. These things do sometimes, they run their course.”
“It ended in March?”
“I think so. Sometime in the spring.”
“So possibly April, possibly May? Perhaps it ended then? On the day she went missing?”
“This conversation is ludicrous.”
“Do you know where Amy is, Congressman?”
“I told you, I do not.”
“Would you be willing to take a lie detector on
that
?”
“I already told you, I have no problem with it, but I will have to consult with my lawyer.”
“You’ll be consulting with him from jail when you get your one phone call,” snapped Harkman. “Answer the detective’s question. When did it end?”
“I told you.”
“No, you told us you don’t remember when. But you are sure, absolutely positive, it wasn’t in May. Not sure when, but pretty sure it wasn’t when she disappeared. Interesting,” said Spencer. “Don’t you think?”
“It was in April, all right?” said Andrew loudly. “Around the middle of April. When I did my taxes, we weren’t together any more.”
Spencer, Harkman, Andrew, all remained silent. Everything they said could and was held against them.
“When did it begin?”
“I don’t know.”
Spencer was amazed at how much Andrew Quinn said he did not know.
“You don’t know? Did you see her only once in her apartment? Did you meet every week? Were you seeing each other for a month, three weeks, forty-seven days?”
“No, a few months.”
“Before or after the reelection?”
“Around there, I think.”
“Where would you meet—at the apartment?”
“Of course not!”
“You’re
indignant
?” asked Spencer, widening his eyes. “Did I offend your sensibilities, congressman? Pardon me.”
“I came to that apartment rarely and only for Lily, never for Amy.” Andrew lowered his eyes. “This is just devastating. For my wife, for my sister, for my children.”
“Indeed.” And his sister could not endure this news at the moment. The fire of his compassion for Lily froze any compassion Spencer might have felt for her brother. “You didn’t answer my question. You have a knack for doing that. Where would you two get together?”
“I don’t know. Wherever.”
“On the street? In the alleys? Did she come to Washington to see you?”
“Sometimes yes.”
“Did she stay overnight?”
“Sometimes yes.”
Spencer nodded slowly. “So this is why she was leaving all her identification behind at home. You’re the one she was trying to protect.”
“I know she did that, but I never asked her to do it, that was all Amy, not me. What can I tell you, she was a very cautious girl. She didn’t want to hurt Lily, I think. We both didn’t.”
“What about hurting your wife, your children?”
Andrew raised his hand. “Can you just spare me the moralizing. I have no stomach for it.”
“Why did you end it? Your wife find out about you?”
“No.”
“So why?”
“I told you. It just ended. It was time.” But Andrew did not look at Spencer when he said it. Did not, or could not. Spencer never took his eyes off him. “It wasn’t working.”
“Your clandestine superficial affair with a girl young enough to be your daughter wasn’t working?”
“That’s right.”
But that was spat out, that did not come out offhand.
Spencer’s brain was swirling into focus. “Did you break it off with her when you realized you were going to be running for the Senate seat, and you were concerned about the chances of a successful outcome of your campaign if the details of your affair became known?”
“Oh, can you stop calling it an affair already!”
That took Spencer by surprise. “What would you call it?” he asked, frowning.
“It’s over! It’s done. It’s finished. I don’t know why you keep
belaboring
this point.”
“Produce for me Amy, and I will stop belaboring this point. Until such time, this will remain a criminal investigation and the point will continue to be belabored.” Spencer didn’t know much about how politics worked, but he was pretty certain that if Andrew Quinn decided to press on with his senatorial campaign, his margin of victory wouldn’t even be 52 after a bitter recount.
Andrew was instructed not to leave the country, not to talk to the press, not to hinder a government investigation, and was informed that all of his phone and bank records would be subpoenaed. As they were walking out, they saw Miera ushering the pre-teenage daughters into another room past two other
glowering women—perhaps Andrew’s sisters. They looked a little like Lily, yet nothing like her. One was tall and prickly, the other smaller and maternal. Everyone looked so grim, eyeing Spencer with dour disapproval.
As they got to the front door to leave, Andrew hit the wall with his fist. “I just got it. There was no hair in Amy’s room. No hair, no fingerprints?”
Spencer didn’t reply.
“Bastards.” Andrew slammed the door behind them.
Spencer shrugged, but the tension of his muscles made it seem more like a shudder.
“Nice one, O’Malley,” said Harkman, as they walked to the car. “Forensics better come back with some fucking Quinn hair in her room, or you’re going to be sweeping the sidewalks for New York next week.”
“Harkman,” Spencer said when they were on the LIE headed back to the city. “So what do you think of him?”
“I can’t tell. The affair alone is unpleasant business. Young girl, sister’s roommate, I mean, a bit slimy, if you ask me. I don’t know about anything else. What do you think?”
“Hmm.” Spencer pretended to be lost in the road. “What I think is that the
Titanic
is at the bottom of the sea.”
After Lily had slept away the afternoon, she took a cab to see her grandmother. The cabdriver got out and helped her up Grandma’s stoop. How she was going to climb her five flights of stairs upon returning home, Lily could not and did not want to think about.
On Saturday nights Grandma held her crooked poker game. Obviously no one cared that it was rigged, because five ladies had been getting together for twenty-five years to play. Four other widows came each Saturday determined to outcheat each other. No one could bluff well, no one had a poker face, but they took the phone off the hook, and played for hours, and drank wine, and ate to bursting, and even smoked cigars. One of them had fallen on the way out, having had too much wine, and the ladies all left an empty chair for their convalescing friend, but continued to play and drink as if death and old age weren’t right outside on Grandma’s stoop.
So when Lily came to the cabal, she was asked—required—to take the place of Zani from Albania, who had been out the last six weeks. The ladies suspected Zani might not come back, since she was eighty-eight and her hip was not healing. The first thing Grandma said upon Lily’s arrival was, “Dear God, Lily, you look like death warmed over. Come here, eat something, will
you? Dana, look at her, this is what kids today do to themselves to look attractive to the opposite sex.”
Dana said, “They don’t understand men like a bit of flesh.” They were talking as if Lily were not in the kitchen. Lily sat and pretended to play, to cheat, even to drink. She tried to have some food, some stinky French cheese, some imported crackers, some pâté. But the smell of food at her mouth made her retch and she stopped trying. No one noticed.
After she lost her twenty bucks in the first hour, she sat and watched them deal and cheat each other out of their twenty bucks.
“Lil, you’re glum, what’s wrong with you?” asked Grandma. “Look at the size of you. Are you anorexic?”
“Leave her alone, Claudia. She’s fine,” said Hannah from Bulgaria, always Lily’s defender. “She’s a young girl living in New York. This is what they look like.” She turned to Lily. “But you did used to have such nice round hips, Liliput. What’s been happening?”
“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 language, 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.