12
Lily was having a rare and desultory conversation with her mother and she could tell it was desultory by the amount of quick, sloppy black circles she was dashing off on her sketchpad, wearing down her nub of charcoal, getting black all over her fingers and her quilted bedspread. She had just come out of her bath—she had been taking baths for a while now, she found herself too tired to stand in the shower.
Now she was feeling relaxed and sleepy, but her mother was keeping her on the phone. Lily was on her new comfy bed, with the sky-blue curtains behind her tied in bows, billowing in the hot breeze. Black circles, black. Blah blah blah. Then her father came on the line and said, “Did your mother tell you she drove the car into a ditch?”
There was silence.
“Can you get off the phone?” said Allison. “Can’t you see I’m talking to my daughter?”
“What ditch?” said Lily incongruously.
“Oh, just a little ditch, by the house,” said Allison.
“Your mother means a ravine, Lil. She crashed the car into a ravine, left it there, and now has to go to court to explain to the judge why she would leave a perfectly good Mercedes in a ditch without notifying either a tow company or the police.”
Allison had nothing to say to that.
And the only thing Lily said to it was, “Is that the first time Mom drove the car into a ditch?”
“Yes, it was an aberration,” Allison said.
“Oh, yeah?” said George. “Tell that to the stop sign you plowed through and knocked over on Wailea Drive last month.”
“It doesn’t count,” said Allison. “That was a little rental car. A Honda.”
“Your mother is on a lot of medication, Lily,” said George, realizing perhaps how all this was sounding. “Sometimes it knocks her out. Makes her shaky behind the wheel.”
Lily called back the next morning when she was pretty certain her mother was asleep. “Papi,” she said, “You can’t let Mom drive a car. The first time was a stop sign, the second time was a ditch, but the third time is going to be a woman with a baby carriage.”
“I know, you don’t think I know? I know! Who lets her? I don’t let her. I tell her all the time I’ll drive her anywhere she needs to go. What else do I have to do? But she says she wants to run out for fifteen minutes to the drug store. And Lily, think about it, what am I, her policeman? Did I retire so I could police your mother? She is a grown woman. She knows when she should and shouldn’t drive.”
“I don’t think she knows. I don’t think she should drive at all. At the best of times she’s a bit … erratic.”
“I don’t know this? I know this better than you, daughter.”
“What’s wrong with her, Papi?”
“Ah. You know your mother. She loves her histrionics. She loves for everything to be about her. Look at me, I’m sick, I’m depressed, I’m not well, I’m going to court. What a sham it all is. There is nothing wrong with her.”
Lily waited. “Nothing?” she said.
“There is one thing wrong with her. She keeps falling down. She can’t walk down the one step to the sunken living room, or up one step to the front door to get the mail without falling down. You should see her legs. You wouldn’t believe what they look like. And her arms. They’re covered with black and blues. You almost can’t imagine how terrible and bruised her legs look. And your mother has such nice legs, as you know.” George chuckled. “If someone didn’t know any better, you’d think she was a battered wife.”
Listening, falling in her sadness for her mother, Lily said, “A person who can’t walk down one step into the sunken living room should not be driving.”
“Don’t tell me. Tell her.” He paused. “She’s sleeping now. Is that why you called? But you know, she doesn’t go out that often. Not often at all. Maybe once a week. She suddenly rushes out. And usually it’s after a good week.”
“‘Good’ meaning … ?”
“Meaning, she’s not screaming, or upset, or incoherent. She even goes walking with me. Then suddenly she rushes out, and things turn bad again for a few days, for a week. I think those meds she keeps taking are no good for her.”
“Papi?” Could Lily get the words out? She took a deep breath. “Something is wrong with mom. She … could she be …”
“What?”
Lily said nothing. She was such a coward.
“What? Drinking, you think?” George said finally.
She let out her breath. “Yes.” What relief. Yes! Drinking. And she didn’t even have to say it.
“No, no. I don’t think so.”
Lily waited. George waited. “Papi, could she be running out of alcohol and then driving to go get it?”
“I don’t think so. She comes back with bags of stuff: shampoo, soap, lotions, bleach, her pills. I carry the bags in for her. I know what’s in them. There is no liquor in the bags.”
“Okay, Papi.”
Lily thought on the way to work that she hoped Spencer was a better investigator than her father, because otherwise Amy was doomed.
One late Friday night Lily was wandering the streets of the East Village looking for the posters they’d hung up of Amy, wandering from Avenue C, Avenue B, Avenue A, First Avenue, Second Avenue, Lafayette, and on Broadway, in front of Dagostino’s she ran into Spencer who was with a thirtysomething woman, her arm through his. He was casually dressed in slacks and an NYPD light jacket, the woman was wearing a skirt and blouse. Her hair was long and brown. She was tall. Pretty.
Lily’s mouth had opened into a gleaming Hi! she had been so happy to see a face she knew, and then she saw the threaded arms and didn’t know what to do or say. Spencer said Hi, Lily, not gleaming, and—
Lily felt so unbearably awkward she wanted magic powers that would let her fall through the sidewalk and down into the firepit of hell. On a Friday night she runs into Spencer, grins like an idiot, and now the smile is cemented on her face, and she doesn’t know where to look, and how in the devil’s name is he going to introduce her, a lumbering oaf—
Spencer said, “Mary, this is Lilianne.”
That’s
