Borough features, p.25
Borough Features, page 25
Stubborn. Gretchen Sparks is stubborn.
One Sunday, I made the decision as I brewed the coffee and listened to her fingers fly across her keyboard. She was wearing a pair of gray leggings and a red thermal shirt. It was November 1st and chilly. The following day was V-Day: Vidya would be waiting to hear from me. I convinced Gretchen to take a shower and brush her hair and go work at a coffee shop that afternoon. I said I needed some time to myself. She relented, and I scrambled to the grocery and back to whip up a meal of ossobuco and Milanese risotto.
Before I lit the candles, I texted her to come home. And she did. She came in saying, “You wouldn’t believe the attitude at that place—” and stopped. Put down her bag. Smiled. “You never give up, do you?”
I looked down, convinced I had gone overboard and blown the whole thing. But, I thought, better to know now than to keep up this foolishness any longer. I said, “I learned it from you.”
She took off her boots, walked across the room, and took my hands. I kissed her then. I kissed her.
And then, my dear Gretchen sat down at my table—our table—unfolded her napkin, and put it on her lap.
Gretchen Sparks isn’t the type of girl you take anywhere. She takes you.
The next day, I came home from work with a pizza to find a wooden doubloon and a small gold key on the counter, and beneath them, a note.
Raajen. Gone to Nashville. Be back in a week. Love, G. I haven’t heard from her since.
EPILOGUE
Avery Lane had circled the airport for an hour and left voice messages. Then she parked and went in. Gretchen had been on the flight from LaGuardia to Nashville, but her suitcase hadn’t been claimed.
It is three months now since the arrest of Dana Quinn. Dana has been indicted for fraud but not for conspiracy. Julian wasn’t so lucky. They found him around Elizabeth, New Jersey, sleeping outdoors, and they charged him with abducting Nicola. They thought at first that he was responsible for all the missing women, but as he was in custody, more went missing and the hysteria continued. A few weeks later, all seven were discovered held captive in a garden shed in Long Island. They arrested the guys soon after—a man and his adult son—and miraculously, everyone survived. Julian awaits trial in Riker’s. Dana didn’t maneuver for a safer placement for his brother-in-law.
Vita, feeling finally like she was getting things right, waited in the Kings County prosecutor’s office one morning until the D.A. came back from court. Vita was able to make a deal as a cooperating witness. She lives in Jersey now, by the ocean in Bayhead. When I visited her there, she made a fire on the beach, and we sat for a long time talking into the night and early morning, moving inside to her enclosed porch when the chill picked up. “I like the cold,” she had said, looking off into the ocean. “It makes me feel awake.”
Gretchen’s old friends at the Crier beat Metro to the story. Marty would have been thrilled. Afterward, UHA settled out of court with Gloria Padilla. She ended up with $350,000, enough to pay some medical bills and put some away for the boy, Jaime, and for her retirement. Not much, considering. And Cora Carter, her friend Osha, and two other nurses who came forward, got hired at United Methodist on 7th Avenue in Brooklyn. Gloria and Cora were suspicious of me at first, but after I told them about Gretchen and me—about our years together, about Gretchen’s brother’s death and how it turned the light off inside of her until this story came along—they spent long hours with me rehashing the details.
“This mess,” Cora Carter said. “It’s greed. That’s all it is. I can’t believe they did her like that.”
“My mother is at peace now,” said Gloria Padilla. “But where is the peace for Gretchen’s mother?”
“Something about her was different,” Roberta told me as we sat at her kitchen table. “She had that look in her eye. I could tell she was in trouble, but I knew from Marty that when they get in that place, there’s no yanking them out.”
Misty Phelps echoed that sentiment. “I didn’t like it. But what was I to do? Let her face it alone?”
“Look,” Conway said, “of course I feel shitty about it. I didn’t want any harm to come to her. I could tell she was too emotionally involved, so I took her off the story. She assaulted an intern.”
“I can’t talk to you without my lawyer present,” said Dana Quinn from his house in Bay Ridge, sitting on the couch with his legs crossed, his ankle bracelet flickering its green light. “But I never wanted harm to come to anybody. I swear.”
“If she woulda just focused on Leonard and ignored this other shit, she’d be fine,” said Darlene Dabrowski, ashing a cigarette into an empty tuna can. “Borough Features blog. Ha. Can’t hang that on the bulletin board.”
“I shouldn’t have listened to her,” Danny Russo said in my office at the Crier, hands shaking, pants rumpled. “I should have gone to the police after they tossed her apartment. I should have followed my gut. She was so damn stubborn.” Then, “Is. She is so damn stubborn.”
The hospital is back under state supervision, and Howard Quinn with New York District 23 Senator Diane Lupinacci drafted the Dominica Padilla Patient Accountability Bill, which puts new, stricter limits on for-profit medical facilities in the tristates. It’s likely to pass in May.
And Vittles? United Hospitals of America had its army of lawyers sweep it all up under their multibillion dollar rug. Vittles returned to Nashville with his wife to direct a hospital there.
“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve so much grief,” said Carla. “I pray to God to bring her home, just like He brought home Nicola. Ungrateful child that she is.”
“Gretchen?” said Otto Sparks in the Brooklyn nursing home that Nico picked out. “She died. Crossing the Atlantic.” His condition has worsened, but they take good care of him there. And he never asks anyone about Dominic. Or Gretchen for that matter. But Nicola has stepped up to the plate marvelously. She sits beside him in the evenings. He watches television while she studies. She’s to graduate in December.
“I know that it’s not my fault,” she said. “But I’m alone now. There’s no . . . crushing weight of goodbye. There’s just . . .” She searched for words. “There’s just me.”
“I’m taking kickboxing classes,” Vita said. “I read a lot. I’ve started keeping a journal. I think”—she traced the tabletop—“I think that day at Green-Wood Cemetery she was trying to tell me something else. Something I couldn’t hear.”
“But what?” I asked.
“I think she was asking me how to go on, how to move through grief and live again. I think she was telling me that she couldn’t. She was wrong about that.”
“How so?”
“Well, she’s doing it right now.” She put her hand to her chest. Her eyes looked ancient and wise. “I can feel her, Raj. I can feel that she’s still alive.”
And maybe she is. A month ago, Nico called me in the early hours of the morning. She had started scouring Craigslist for any scent of her sister—and she thought she found something in the Missing Connections section. It said: “Nico. I am underground like Oma. Take care of Ma.” That could be anything, couldn’t it? A whisper in the wind. But something to cling to.
I moved into the bungalow my parents bought as a gift to themselves when I graduated college. They hardly ever use it. The busy season will start soon, and vacationers will drag their chairs and umbrellas through the sand past me, and there will be no quiet.
But for now, it is early March. The water is frigid. Only the sternest, or stupidest, seagulls remain.
I told Avery Lane where she could find me, and I made friends with the lighthouse keeper, should Gretchen be summoned by the old language she shared with her brother.
.... . .-.. .-.. ---
H-E-L-L-O
...- . -. ..- ...
V-E-N-U-S
.- -. --- -- --- .-.. -.--
A-N-O-M-A-L-Y
As I’ve mentioned, the news doesn’t tell the whole story. And I don’t claim to either. But I knew Gretchen once—what made her tick, what pissed her off, what brought her joy. I’ve taken some liberties in order to get to the capital-T truth, knowing Gretchen, loving Gretchen, losing Gretchen twice now—twice.
It should be obvious where I’ve improvised, where I’ve imagined her in private, pacing her tiny apartment, walking the streets. I retraced her every move as best I could.
It is still not enough.
It will never be enough.
The night, dear Neruda, is shattered and she is not with me. Oh, Gretchen. Are you out there? Do you still draw breath?
––Raajen Patel
Cape May, New Jersey
March 3, 2016
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote most of Borough Features in an old, immobile Airstream among the goats at Yellow Bird Art Farm in Woodbury, Tennessee, as well as at Penuel Ridge Retreat Center in Ashland City, Tennessee, and at Rivendell Writers Colony in Sewanee, Tennessee. All of these folks provided very cheap or free lodging to me so I could unplug and work on my book. The Nashville Public Library selected me to use the private Writer’s Room across the hall from the Nashville Banner archive. I was inspired by the storied newspaper during my time there. To these folks and institutions, I will always be grateful.
Thanks also goes to my editor Jen Chesak of Wandering in the Words Press, whose sharp eye and big heart saw this book through to the finish; my teachers Suzanne Heyd, Tom Piazza, Chris Chambers, and David Gates; my friends, especially Julia Sorrentino, Mishka Shubaly, Christy Carew, and Laura Huston; my family; and the staff of the Nashville Scene.
This book is dedicated in memory of Tama McCoy, who hired me to help children write novels in 2016. I wrote my first pages seated beside them.
And I thank my one love, Tony Youngblood, always my port in the storm.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Daniel Meigs
Erica Ciccarone has worked as a waitress, grocery-store teller, high school teacher, college professor, dog walker, journalist, editor, and feral cat wrangler. She holds an M.F.A. from The New School Creative Writing Program and a B.A. from Loyola University New Orleans. She is an associate editor at BookPage. In 2022, she was recognized by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia with the David Carr Award in Investigative Journalism for her work at the Nashville Scene. She lives in Nashville.
Erica Ciccarone, Borough Features
