That couldn’t happen. I could not let that happen.
“I’m in love with you,” I blurted. “I want to marry you. I mean, not this minute, but eventually. There. I said it! I’m glad I said it. If that scares you, I’m sorry, but there it is.”
She stared at me, those big eyes glistening with tears.
“I know it sounds crazy. I don’t want to scare you.”
“I’m not scared.”
“You’re crying.”
“Yeah.” She wiped her eyes, shivered. “Yeah, I’m crying.”
I moved to hold her but the set of her shoulders told me to stay away, for my own sake….
“Lynn?”
“My parents were in love once, I suppose.” This was a strange voice coming from her, both vulnerable and distant. She giggle-sobbed. “Funny, huh? My father, who won’t even let you in the house, was supposedly crazy about my mother.”
“Lynn—”
“And look what happened. They don’t even touch each other. They don’t even talk.”
I swallowed, felt the panicked pulse of my heart in my throat. “That wouldn’t happen with us, baby. We could be different.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Things I can’t even talk about.”
And then she broke down in sobs. I put my arm across her shoulders and led her on the long walk through the suddenly cold sand to what turned out to be the last bus home that night.
She was silent the whole way, awake but with her eyes closed. On the short walk from the bus stop to her house she stayed a step ahead of me, no matter how hard I tried to keep up. She didn’t stop until she reached her gate, and then it was time for what would turn out to be a final good-bye.
“Lynn, listen. I didn’t mean I want to marry you now. I meant someday. You know. When I can get that wheelbarrow full of dough, you know?”
She managed a smile. “You know I was only kidding about that.”
“I know, but still. Maybe I’ll get it anyway. We’ll go to Italy, change it all into lire and live like kings.”
She nodded. “Maybe. But even if we don’t, we’ve had a lot of sweet days, haven’t we, Mick? More than most people get, that’s for sure.”
I hated what she’d said. It sounded like the end of something, an obituary.
“Yeah, we’ve had sweet days. And we’ll have a lot more.”
She hesitated, then got up on her toes to kiss my forehead. “I’ll see you, Mickey DeFalco.”
She turned and hurried into her house, and I knew by the way she’d used my whole name that something beyond terrible was about to happen.
And it did. In the middle of the night Lynn took off, nobody knew where. No note, nothing. The whole neighborhood was shocked. She seemed to be a loving girl with good grades in a good Catholic school. She seemed to have a stable family life and a boyfriend who adored her. And just like that, she took off.
But that wasn’t all. In the early morning hours after Lynn had vanished, a drunken Captain Walter Mahoney went into a rage over her disappearance. He tumbled down the rickety wooden set of stairs to his basement, snapped his spine and was paralyzed from the waist down. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The New York City Fire Department built a ramp for the Captain on the front stoop of his house, and there was even a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the ramp.
BURNING ANGEL TRADES WINGS FOR WHEELS, said the photo caption in the New York Post.
It was the beginning of the end for the entire Mahoney family. A runaway daughter, a paralyzed father…and then, ten years later, all four firefighting Mahoney brothers died in a raging warehouse blaze in the Bronx.
Of course by this time I’d been on the West Coast for a long time, and I’ll never forget the phone call I got from my mother regarding the quadruple service at Eruzione’s Funeral Home. It was attended by nearly everybody in Little Neck, along with TV crews from three news programs. All of the Burning Angel’s sons being laid to rest! Who could resist such an event? At least one person.
“Well,” my mother informed me, “there was no sign of Lynn.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know what happened.”
“How could she not know? It’s on television!”
“Maybe there’s no TV where she is.”
“There are no excuses for her absence, unless she’s dead.”
I swallowed. “You think Lynn is dead?”
“I didn’t say that. I said that would be her only excuse for not being here.”
I hung up on my mother. The concept that Lynn might be dead was unacceptable. I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been dangling from a thread of hope since she’d run away, and suddenly that thread was as slender as the strand of a spiderweb…ahh, but still strong…so strong….
My parents had nothing to do with the Mahoney family, but my mother’s bulletins about them continued over the years, like dispatches from a war zone.
The death of his sons took it all out of the Captain, she reported…. He began to shrivel and shrink, physically and spiritually…. Lynn’s mother had to push him everywhere until at last he died of heart failure, nine years after he’d lost his sons, nineteen years after he’d fallen down the stairs.
Lynn missed that funeral, too, as my mother eagerly informed me in one of her last phone calls to me in Los Angeles.
And it occurred to me that maybe my mother was right. Maybe Lynn was dead. Maybe it was time for me to stop thinking about her, once and for all.
Maybe.
A few weeks after Lynn disappeared I lost my virginity in the backseat of a rusting Ford Pinto to a girl named Rosie Gambardello, who worked the cash register next to Lynn’s and always went out of her way to flirt with me. We’d both gotten drunk on a jug of homemade red wine from her father’s cellar, rough stuff that left an acid tang on your tongue, unless that was the taste of Rosie.
It was fast, it was furious, it meant nothing to me. We hadn’t even taken our clothes off. Just unzipped and unbuttoned what we needed to get it done, artichoke style. A flick of her hips and I was out of her, rolling over to my side of the car. It was like I’d stopped for gas. She sat up and lit a cigarette.
“Ya still miss her, huh?”
That’s how it is in Little Neck, Queens. Everybody knows everything.
“Yeah, I do miss her.”
“She put out?”
“Shut up, Rosie.”
“I knew it. I knew it! I could tell, just lookin’ at her. A snob. Too good for it. Too good for the Little Neck boys. That’s why she run off.”
“Rosie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, well, I could tell you had a good time just now.” I saw her smile by the glow of her cigarette, a horrifying, gap-toothed grin. “This was maw like it, huh, Mick?”
I tumbled out of her car and went home to puke, all that red wine coming up like an angry tide. I was crying at the same time, the one and only time I ever cried over Lynn.
A few weeks later I wrote “Sweet Days,” the lyrics about my last night with Lynn, giving the song its story….
Spoke