Borough Features, page 18
But these were all from the 2015 legislative session. He had this whole second half of the year to scheme and plan, and January would herald a fresh crop of bills.
For over an hour, she sifted through his bills, scratching notes in a legal pad, discovering nothing that seemed relevant. What now? She cracked another beer.
Committees and subcommittees. He sat on Veterans; Homeland Security and Military Affairs; Judiciary; Insurance; Civil Service; and Pensions, Codes, and Health.
Quinn was quite active on Health, especially this past session. He sponsored a bill to add narcotics investigators all over the state, one for lupus research, two more to increase Medicaid and Medicare allocations for specific geriatric ailments. He knew his constituency. She kept digging, feeling a slight buzz from the beer. Nothing serious. Nothing that slowed her down. A fourth wouldn’t hurt, but she’d stop there.
Finally, she found something that inched her closer. An agenda item from early 2015 featured a bill that would provide tax-incentive financing for for-profit hospitals.
Bingo.
It got out of the committee on a slim margin but died on the Assembly floor. But this was a favorite GOP tactic. Start with something big that’s likely to be shot down. Then slowly erode the moral fiber of the legislative body. She jotted down the names of the bill’s cosponsors, the yay and nay votes.
Coney Island wasn’t in Quinn’s district. The senator for district 23 was a woman named Diane Lupinacci. The Italians really had Brooklyn by the balls.
Lupinacci, however, was a Democrat, and voted opposite Quinn on many measures in Codes, Judiciary, and Civil Service and Pensions, the committees they shared. How might Diane Lupinacci feel about South Brooklyn Hospital? She had voted against it on the floor. It seemed Lupinacci would want a say in what’s happening in her own backyard.
Gretchen read the agenda of the final Health meeting in the 2015 session, in which members voted on new appointments.
“Hello, Diane Lupinacci,” Gretchen said. She rechecked the Health Committee members, but Diane was voted down.
This—this is something I can work with.
The discovery rang all through her body. Her toes tingled. Her throat flushed. She overturned the dead potted plant on her balcony and retrieved the doubloon and the key, pocketed them, and ran down to the street. She stood on the corner of Christopher and 6th Avenue. The rumbling of the subway shook the grate below her feet.
It had been so long, so miserably long since she’d felt the high of work, of digging up dirt, of wanting justice where the system had failed.
She wanted to keep that feeling, to stretch it out as far as it could go. The sheer thrill of public information made her lightheaded. She took off west past her apartment and into the dear, well-trodden maze of the West Village, its narrow streets and tiny storefronts, its darkened brownstones and bright bodegas. Before she knew it, she had taken enough left turns to end up at Christopher Street Pier. She ran across West Street and through the park, wind whipping at her hair, lungs burning from the chilly air and the week of smoking and the unexpected exercise. Summers filled the park with lollygaggers and lovers, but in mid-October, few remained. Her boots made a hollow thud on the pier’s wooden floorboards.
She stopped at the end of the pier. Had it not been for the railing, she might have kept going. Blood pulsed in her ears and sweat wet her back. She let out a cry, a howl, a barbaric yawp to let the river and the Statue of Liberty and city know that she, Gretchen Sparks, was back.
She looked at her watch. It was ten-fifty.
She retreated across the pier and turned south toward Houston Street.
TWENTY-FIVE
Author’s Note
Despite Gretchen’s passionate argument for journalism, I changed my major from poetry to healthcare administration. What can I say? I have a knack for bureaucracy, for rules and regulations, for board meetings and policy and typing up memos. I got a graduate degree in Nursing Home Administration.
I kept attending open mics, depressing as they were. I kept sending my poems out to literary magazines far beyond my reach—Harper’s, The New Yorker, Ploughshares. Aim high, my father always said, not about poetry.
I landed a job in a midtown nursing home almost immediately, managing billing. Before long, I managed purchasing, too, and then all of finances. I requested an hour a day to be on the floor, poking around with the residents. The director, a rich old bastard who seemed amused by the request, allowed it provided I could stay on top of my duties.
I kept dreaming.
Four years in, the director called me into his office to tell me he was to retire and would like to recommend me to the board.
Me? Quiet, daydreaming, eats-lunch-alone-to-read-John-Ashbury-poems me? “Yes you, Raj. You’ve got a mind for administration, both big-picture vision and detail orientation that makes you a reputable candidate. I never cared for the minutiae of the work. There are so many things I still want to do.” He gazed out the window of his corner office at the East River and over to Queens, his skin so pale that it appeared translucent beneath his eyes. “I still have a few good years left to travel, write my memoirs, get back to nature. Life is short. You’ve done good for us here. The residents and staff respect and like you, but you’ve managed to keep yourself detached enough that there’s no worry on that front.” He picked up a marble paperweight from his neat desk and set it down again. “What do you say?”
I turned around and walked out of the room, went to my desk, and drafted a short letter of resignation.
The night that Gretchen declared herself at the Christopher Street Pier, the doorbell rang at my SoHo apartment just after eleven o’clock.
I opened the door and jumped back in alarm. Gretchen Sparks, sweating and wild-eyed, leaned against the building, panting.
You didn’t really think she’d gone back to the beer barn to shag that beast, did you?
Well, she didn’t.
I stepped outside.
“What are you doing here? Is it Marty?” My words must have sounded so harsh, so accusatory. We stood face to face for the first time in over two years since she’d crammed the last of her things into a cab and said to me from the curb, “I’m sorry.”
And what had I said? “No, you’re not.”
“Raj,” she said now, “I’m sorry to show up like this.”
So full of apologies.
She looked down at the ground. “I thought if I called, you’d hang up on me.”
The truth was, she had been on my mind all week, it being the anniversary of her brother’s death.
She looked pretty terrible. Her face was puffy. She had dark shadows under her eyes. Some mascara smeared from her eye to her ear, and her rectangular glasses, smudged with fingerprints, were a step in the wrong direction from the cat eyes that she wore for a decade. She had changed her hair, of course.
Don’t they always change their hair before they show up late in the evening?
She wore it short, all the length that she had braided day in and day out, gone and replaced by a cute but unkempt shag the color of mice.
“Can I come in?”
“Who is it, baby?” Vidya said from the bedroom. The air left my chest.
“Oh,” Gretchen said. “Never mind coming in. I wanted to ask you a couple things about Medicare. I’m doing some research and just can’t wrap my head around it all. Could we meet sometime? Tomorrow?”
Had she come two years ago, I would have kicked whatever trollop lay in my bed out onto the street and took her by the hand.
“Is it for Otto?”
“Raj?” Vidya called.
“Gretchen. It’s late. You showing up like this—it’s not fair to me. If you don’t have any news about Marty, I can’t imagine what we might discuss.” I went back in the house and began to close the door, but she caught it with her boot.
“But it is for Marty. I mean, it’s a story that Marty started before—”
“Gretchen.” I said her dear name again and nodded at her foot. “Good night.”
I don’t know what I would have done if she’d refused to remove the boot. I might have lunged at her and knocked her into the street. I might have cowered before her and offered myself to be sacrificed. But Gretchen Sparks removed her foot, said good night, and watched me shut the door.
I hardly slept.
TWENTY-SIX
Suite 4D was in its usual state of disorder. It opened up into a living room with a blow-up armchair half deflated, a zebra-print area rug, and a standard university dorm loveseat with wood frame and maroon cushions. The coffee table was covered with an incense tray overflowing with wormlike ashes, magazines, an open bottle of nail polish remover, and four bottles of candy-colored polish. On the walls hung black-and-white street scenes of Paris and Rome and Madrid—places Nico Sparks had never been. The bass of a rap song faintly pouted from another suite.
“Hello?” Gretchen peeked into the kitchen—sink full of dishes, an overflowing trash can with a pizza box crammed halfway inside, an open window. The door to Nico’s room was open. Gretchen knocked and went in. The roommate lay on her bed, flipping through an issue of Cosmo with her usual bored and contemptuous expression. She didn’t look up.
“Hey, Gabby.”
“What do you want?”
“I’m looking for Nico.”
Gabby stopped on a page smattered with handbags and yawned. “As you might have noticed, she’s not home.”
“She didn’t show up yesterday for our brother’s anniversary either.”
Gabby shrugged.
“Did you notice if she overslept?”
“Nope.”
“Nope you didn’t notice, or nope she didn’t oversleep?”
Gabby looked up. She had vacant, bovine eyes. Her mouth worked a wad of gum. “It’s like I told the officer. She didn’t come home Tuesday night. Had a date.”
Gretchen’s stomach did a flip. “Wait, what officer?”
“Detective Something-or-other. Came by last night.” She turned the page of the magazine as if exhausted by the task.
“Has Nico called you or texted?”
“Maybe. Once or twice.”
“She’s been out of pocket for almost twenty-four hours. Aren’t you worried?”
The girl sighed and put her magazine down with a splat. “She stays out sometimes. No big deal.”
“Who’s the guy?”
Gabby rolled her eyes and reached to her nightstand for a hairbrush. She pulled it through her molasses brown hair. “Maybe if you took a bit more of an interest in her life, you’d know that she met him in the park the day after her birthday, which you forgot.”
“Is he a student?”
“Why don’t you find one of her friends who is not quote-unquote an asshole and ask her?”
“You said she texted you. What did she say?”
Gabby flipped over and faced the wall.
Gretchen darted to her nightstand and grabbed Gabby’s iPhone. “Hey! You can’t—”
“Shut up.” At 11:20 p.m. Nico had written, omg we are totes connecting i think I’m gonna get some 2nite!!! with three heart-eyes emoji.
Gabby hadn’t responded.
Then, at 1:23 a.m., now somewhere in the bk not sure where can u talk????
“This one at one-thirty—did you call her?”
Gabby yawned and turned on her side. She started doing some kind of Pilates move with her leg. “I was sleeping.”
“And did you respond in the morning?”
“Are we done with the interrogation? I don’t know anything. Now, I’d thank you to put down my phone and get out.”
Gretchen left her business card on the nightstand with the phone. She turned and assessed Nico’s side of the room. The bed was unmade, leopard print sheets balled up at the foot, a flat pillow without a pillowcase. Clothes spilled out of crooked, open drawers. Perfume, makeup, cheap jewelry, and a lighted magnifying mirror cluttered the top of the dresser. She picked up a strappy marine blue dress crumpled on the floor, folded it neatly, and put it on top of some other clothes.
Nico’s desk was just as messy with psychology textbooks, more nail polish, and random odds and ends scattered about. She picked up a dusty picture of the three of them standing outside the church on Easter, Gretchen in a black dress, pale and unsmiling; Nicky in a navy suit and mustard tie, his messy mop of light brown hair sticking up everywhere; and Nico, just six years old, in a pink-and-white ruffled frock, holding an Easter basket and smiling, her already long hair in a tumble of curls. Another dusty frame held Nicky’s high school photo. He wore a crisp white shirt and the same mustard tie, his hair cut a bit shorter and parted on one side, his smile the most natural thing in the world. She sifted through Nico’s textbooks and notebooks, some of them as dusty as the glass of the picture frames.
It was just like Nico to call up Gretchen and put on a big guilt trip about her birthday and the family, only to shack up with some douchebag for a few days and turn her phone off.
Then she saw it: Nico’s glittered notebook. She slipped it into her bag and turned. Gabby was on the floor now doing crunches. Gretchen stepped over her and out the door.
The mid-morning sun glinted off the cars and the buildings and caught her off guard. It was nine-thirty already. She took out her phone.
“What do you mean she wouldn’t talk to you?” Carla said.
“Did you call the police?” Gretchen had to get to the office.
“What do you think, stunod? Of course I called the police! There’s two more girls missing! Possibly more!”
“That’s because every coed in Manhattan’s mother is calling the police at the first provocation. If you’d back off, maybe they could do their job.”
“I can feel it in me, Gretchen. Like I did when your brother died.”
“Jesus, can you not—”
“Lord, she takes your name in—”
“She’s just out with some guy. You’re gonna give yourself a heart attack over nothing. I’m going to work now.”
“While you’re downtown, go over to Parisi and get me a loaf of Italian bread and a mortadella. I’ll pay you back.”
“Goodbye, Ma.”
Typical.
The sausage comes second to the missing daughter, but not by far.
On the subway, she read the most recent diary entry, almost against her will. The last thing she wanted was more details about her sister’s life. And besides, their mother never respected their privacy. No matter where the Sparks kids hid their journals, Carla rooted them out.
Welcome to age 23, here’s some alcohol, here’s some shitty friends, here’s a toilet to puke in. One for the books. I don’t care so much that she forgot my birthday. Know why? I woke up when she climbed into the little bed. She put her arms around me and she snuggled me like a big spoon. It was a long time before I heard her breathing change and she fell asleep and even though I had to pee so bad I didn’t move until it was time to make it to class. She’d be so mad at me if she knew I used her toothbrush but my mouth was so foul. I miss Nicky so much, and I can’t help but wonder if it would be easier if Gretchen and I had a better relationship or something. Or something. Or something.
That was it. The end of the entry. The subway screeched into Union Square.
She made it to her desk undetected. It was Thursday. She’d been putting the obituary off for over a week. And now, she knew she would do Marty’s memory better by taking a little time for research before lunch.
Before she learned Medicaid, she had to learn hospitals. She read Senate bills and the minutes of House hearings. She read articles about New York hospitals, about Tennessee hospitals, about California hospitals if it seemed relevant—anything to give her a picture of that bright white landscape. She scanned medical journals for quantitative data and read personal accounts by nurses and doctors who had defected from the for-profit sector. She read and read and read.
NYU had required her to choose a second major. “Are you sure I can’t just take the journalism classes twice?” Gretchen had asked. She’d had a series of arguments with the department chair who advised Economics of Statistics. Finally, the woman invited her to an event.
“A faculty lecture?” Gretchen scrunched up her nose.
“Yes, Ms. Sparks,” the Chair said. “If it means you’ll stop waiting outside my office, you can come as my guest. Maybe you’ll be inspired by our speaker.” She nodded toward her other students waiting in the hallway, handed Gretchen a flier, and scooted her out the door.
The lecture was titled, “Wild Over the Web: Training the Next Generation of Print Journalists.” How was this going to get her out of an econ major? She got to the hall early and sat in front.
From the moment Marty Mitnik opened his mouth, she was transfixed. It wasn’t one lecture, but a hundred. He talked about the “open unwillingness of veteran journalists and indeed some journalism professors to groom this generation for print.” He said it wasn’t the obligation of kids to embrace print journalism; it was the responsibility of faculty and investigators to make print as exciting as anything online. He told of a story for the Metropolitan––which Gretchen read just about every day––about the corporate lobbyists and legislators who cavorted to form the for-profit prison industry.
Wait! Gretchen nearly jumped out of her chair. She had read that story! Sure, she hadn’t understood all of the public sector/private sector stuff—maybe that econ major would come in handy—but she had read it front to back and remembered best the people he described. The woman who said she was only given five tampons per month, the laborer denied treatment for a hernia until he had to undergo a costly surgery and lost part of his large intestine—Gretchen may not have understood every word of the economics and legislation, but she understood them.
He said that when he’d investigated that story he felt like he was re-discovering the reasons he had wanted to pursue the news to begin with: the honesty of it, the sheer heft and brawl of the facts that are always available somewhere if you’re “crazy enough to start looking.”
Gretchen scribbled notes as fast as she could. She didn’t want to miss a word.
