Outside there’s a full moon, a golden globe that glares through the window, splashing its light on the floor. As the clouds roll by, they snatch with them the moonlight, and the room grows darker, the puzzle pieces lying before Ben and me harder to see.
But then the moon returns again, taunting and mocking us, its light bursting across the floor, and I have to wonder if a nefarious Esther is out there somewhere taunting and mocking us, too.
WEDNESDAY
Alex
I wake up earlier than usual and bike to the only twenty-four-hour grocery store in town. There’s hardly a scrap of food in Pops’s and my refrigerator, and what’s there is likely expired or is growing green with mold. It’s a three-mile trip in either direction, and so I bike there and cart home a dozen eggs, a carton of milk, shredded cheese and fruit in a plastic sack that dangles from the bike’s handlebars. There’s not much fresh fruit in season this time of year, but I get a couple of apples and a bunch of red grapes. It’ll have to do.
Back in Pops’s and my kitchen, I start washing the fruit and scrambling the eggs. I add the milk and cheese to the eggs, the way Pops likes them, and some salt and pepper, too. The house begins to fill with a smell of homemade food, but even that doesn’t wake Pops, sound asleep, the door to his bedroom pulled to. I sift through our dishes to find a plate that isn’t cracked or chipped, and begin placing the prepared food here and there, a mound of eggs, a handful of grapes. When I’m through, the plate looks vacant still—empty and sad, a bit pathetic—and I know that I should have gotten more: toast, a bagel, sausage links. Something along those lines, but I didn’t. Oh, well. I pour a glass of milk, and then second-guess it all and think that I should have gotten juice. Or coffee. Or cereal. On a whim I snatch a Mountain Dew from the fridge, just in case. You never know what it is that she likes to drink with her eggs.
And then I load it into my arms, head out the front door and cross the street. I also leave Pops a plate.
She’s still asleep when I come in, but the sound of my footsteps draws her from sleep. That or the smell of eggs. She sits up slowly in her makeshift bed as only an old lady would do, the stretching of body parts—arms and legs and such—as if it hurts, the bones and muscles being thrust back into place, the reviving of limbs that have gone senseless and numb.
“Good morning,” I say, maybe too spiritedly, and she says to me, “Good morning.”
Her words are gruff, her voice still sluggish and dopey, but I smile, anyway.
I’m just glad that she’s still here.
I thought about it half the night, about the fruit and the eggs and whether or not I’d find the house abandoned when I returned come morning. I considered the possibility that she’d be out, wandering the streets of town, or that maybe she’d have boarded the Pere Marquette and headed far away from here. But here she is, in the flesh, her hair a jumble of bedhead, creases on her pale skin. She wears my sweatshirt still, the hood pulled up over her head. The minute I arrive she attempts to shimmy out of it—as if that’s the reason I came—but I say to her, “No. Keep it,” and so she does. I’ve showered and dressed and have on a new sweatshirt today, same beat-up cotton, another shade of gray.
“I brought you breakfast,” I say as I set the tray of food on the floor beside her makeshift bed. I half expect varmints to appear from every corner of the room at the prospect of food, but they don’t. The house is quiet and still.
She reaches for the fork and loads the eggs onto its tines, blowing before she sets the scrambled eggs inside her mouth. I hear her stomach growl. I can tell from the look on her face that she likes it; either that or she’s so absolutely famished she’d eat anything and claim it was good.
“I like it,” she says. But then another look settles on her pretty face, a look of wonder or gratitude, or maybe even trust, as she says these words to me. “People don’t usually do nice things for me.” I am silent, not quite sure what to say to that, and she adds, “You didn’t have to do this, you know.”
I tell her that I know. But inside my heart fills with warmth, though the dilapidated house remains cold.
“There’s more,” I say, excusing myself while she eats. I tell her to keep eating. “Don’t wait for me,” I say. “I’ll be right back.”
And then I go, out the same window in the back of the home. In the backyard, in the dense underbrush that was once a nice garden, no doubt, I take in the overgrown shrubbery that needs to be hacked. It sidles its way up the home, into every crevice it can find, under the aluminum siding so that the siding slips right off the house. The stumps of deadened trees remain in the lawn, succumbing one by one to fungus and bacteria.
But the thing that really gets my attention is the tire swing, an old rubber sphere, now deflated, that hangs from an old oak tree by a rope. I wander to that swing and give it a gentle push and then stand and watch as it dithers back and forth through the gray November air. I hear phony children squeal in delight. Wheee! They beg: Again, again! Once they were here, but now they’re gone.
And then I scamper off to Pops’s and my garage to get what it is that I need. The street is dead quiet; it’s too early for anyone else to be up.
I didn’t sleep much last night. In fact, I hardly slept at all. I was up half the night thinking of Pearl sleeping on the hard floor, freezing cold. And that’s when I remembered the kerosene heater in our garage and a five-gallon, half-empty container of kerosene, one that Pops used to keep handy for when power outages rattled our town, something that only ever happened in the wake of winter blizzards. We needed something to keep us warm when the heavy snow all but buried us alive, and this was it. Pops bought it years ago—ten, maybe fifteen—and many times, it’s come in handy. Years ago he wouldn’t let me touch the darn thing—too dangerous, he’d say. These days I won’t let him near it.
I wrangle the awkward, heavy heater back to the house and inside, and there she sits, Pearl, with the plate of food on her lap. She’s about finished it all, and I can see already that she looks full, maybe even satisfied. She eyes the heater in my hand and asks, “What’s that?” and I tell her what it is as I fill it up with the kerosene and turn up the wick, igniting the heater. Just like that, the flame grows orange and the room starts to warm, bringing a sunniness to Pearl’s face I hadn’t seen before. She smiles.
I adjust the wick to the right height and say to her, though I don’t think it needs to be said, “These things can be dangerous. We need to keep an eye on it, make sure it’s off before we go,” but then I shrug, not wanting to make her feel like a ninny, and say, “but I’m sure you knew that already.”
But it’s second nature, I guess, an effect of reminding Pops all the time to turn off the oven, to close the front door, to flush the john.
Instead of saying anything about the heater, she says to me, “I like your necklace,” and it’s automatic, the way my hands go to the beaded shark’s tooth necklace that Ingrid made for me all those years ago.
“Thanks,” I say, taking in the shade of her eyes, a light brown like amber.
“Is it from a girl?” she asks point-blank, and I’m all but certain my face burns as red as the flames in the heater.
I shake my head, setting myself down on the floor. “Just a friend,” I say, but I feel the inclination to tell her more, to tell her about Leigh Forney, and how, for me, there really aren’t any girls. For strength and protection, Ingrid had told me when she gave me the necklace years ago, after I started working for Priddy to support Pops. She did it because she felt bad for me, like half the town felt bad for me at the time. My mother had abandoned me, and my father was a drunk. Such is life.
I run my hands along the tip of the shark’s tooth and, staring into Pearl’s eyes, I think maybe it’s working, after all.
But I don’t tell her any of this. Instead, I leave it at that—just a friend—and allow the room to gr
ow quiet and still.
There are things I want to ask her: her name and what she’s doing here—in our town, in this house—for starters. But I can’t. I open my mouth to speak, but all that transpires is air.
She asks questions of me instead.
“You live across the street,” she says, and it’s then that I know she’s been watching me, seeing Pops and me at the kitchen table, maybe, irradiated by the bright lights of our home. Maybe she knows more about me than I think.
I say, “I do.”
“With your family?” she asks, and I say, Yes, and then, No, setting finally instead on, “With my father.” He’s family, don’t get me wrong. There’s just more to it than that.
“No brothers or sisters?” she asks, and I say no.
“Where’s your mother?” she asks. And though so many phony, easy answers spring to mind—she’s dead, or she’s in a persistent vegetative state in a hospital following some traumatic brain injury, or she’s in jail on countless drug citations and a murder charge—none of these responses prevail. Instead, I tell her the truth.
“She left,” I say as I reach for a forgotten grape at the edge of Pearl’s plate and pop it in my mouth so I don’t have to say anything more.
There aren’t many memories I have of my mom, but there are a few. They’re not good. I’m standing beside her bed, having had a bad dream. Crying. And not just a whiny kind of cry, but a really scared cry because there are monsters under my bed and I need her to get them for me. She pretends to sleep before she sits up in bed and tells me to go back to my room. It’s the middle of the night, Alex. Even for a five-year-old, I know there’s no compassion in that voice of hers, no affection. She’s stone cold. I tell her I’m scared, but she yanks the blanket up over her head and pretends she can’t hear me. Pops, working a nightshift, isn’t home. I poke a finger into the blanket and beg for her to come. She pushes me away with her hands. She doesn’t come, and in time I give up. But I won’t step foot in my bedroom. I won’t sleep in there with the monsters. Instead, I sleep on the hallway floor. In the morning, still bushed, her eyes only half-open, she steps on me. When I cry out she yells at me again. This is my fault.
Motherhood scared the bejesus out of her. She never wanted to be a mother. Any form of affection terrified her, as well. My mother’s smiles were rare and her hugs were always succinct, plaited with tension and angst. As if it hurt to hug. As if it was painful. That’s one of the few things I remember from my early years, the way she wiggled out of my clasp when I wrapped my clumsy little boy arms around her knees or her waist—as high as I could reach—as I tailed her, toddling, arms extended, wanting more, just one more hug, until she got mad.
Go away, Alex. Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.
That’s another thing I remember. My mother’s small feet, barefoot, trotting down the tatty carpeting of our home, shooing me away like a fly. Alex! she would snap, voice on the cusp of losing it, but trying hard to maintain control. I told you to go away. Don’t touch me.
“Where’d she go?” Pearl asks, and I say simply, “Away,” because in all honesty, I don’t know where it is that my mother went to and I try not to think about it, about the possibility that she could have another family—another husband, another child—somewhere out there in the world.
“That sucks,” she says point-blank as she pushes the plate of food away. “People can be so selfish sometimes, don’t you think?”
I tell her that I do.
And then for whatever reason, I gather the courage to ask, “What are you doing here?” And she smiles that crafty smile again and says to me, “I could tell you, Alex. But then I’d have to kill you,” and we laugh, and though it’s a curbed laugh, an inhibited laugh, I realize how good it feels. It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed. Too long. The noise sounds hollow here in the abandoned home, bouncing off the rickety walls and back to our ears where I have to remind myself that the laughter is a good thing. It means that we are happy.
I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be happy.
I also notice that she has a beautiful smile. Simple, with small, precise white teeth that are all but hidden behind the lips. It’s unpresuming and sweet. I get the feeling that she hasn’t smiled in a while, too, that she hasn’t laughed. Not a real, genuine, bona fide laugh, anyway.
“The truth?” she asks then, pausing in her laughter as she reaches a fearless hand across the two-foot span and runs her fingertips along my shark’s tooth. I feel my body stiffen, the blood in my veins coagulate and solidify. I can hardly breathe.
“Just passing through,” she says, though from the look in her eye I’m guessing there’s more to it than that, and once again my thoughts retreat to one man and one man alone: Dr. Joshua Giles. As a surge of jealously swells up inside me, I unearth one more reason not to like the guy.
She’s here for him when I wish more than anything that she could be here for me.
I wonder what that means—just passing through—and consider what it would be like to be a drifter, to move from town to town all alone, just passing through. I wonder if somewhere, out there, she has family, friends, a boyfriend, someone who is missing her, someone who is looking for her.
Someone who is thinking of her the way I now think of her.
“How long will you stay,” I ask, “before you have to leave?”
She shrugs and says to me, “I’m in no hurry,” and I wonder what that means: a day, a week, a year? I want to ask her. I want to know definitively which day I’ll show up at this forsaken home and she won’t be here. Tomorrow? Friday? Next week? Will she say goodbye before she leaves? Will she ask for me to go, to tag along with her on her trip? Doubtful, but still, I can dream.
I don’t ask her any of these things. Instead, I fidget with the heater to avoid her inveigling eyes.
Today I don’t stay too long; I can’t stay too long. I peer down at a cheap watch on my left wrist and check the time. Before long, I’m due at work, another day of bussing tables for Priddy’s minimum wage.
“You’ll remember to turn the heater off before you leave?” I remind her as her hand slides from my necklace, and she says she will. I nod my head and I say that I have to go, peering back over my shoulder for one last look before I’m gone.
Quinn
There’s a dish Esther serves. It’s a vegetarian recipe, a stir-fry with beans and broccoli and baby corn. And tofu. It should be disgusting but it’s not. It’s absolutely delicious. It also has a sauce complete with soy sauce and rice vinegar.
And a quarter cup of peanut flour.
Which doesn’t matter in the least bit to me, but it does matter to Kelsey Bellamy.
She was four years old when she was first diagnosed with a peanut allergy. That’s what her fiancé, Nicholas Keller, tells me as I sit across from him at his own kitchen table in a recently renovated flat in Hyde Park. It’s a small glass-top table that generally just sits one.
Him.
His eyes are disconsolate, brown eyes that dampen when I mention her name. Kelsey.
“She’d eaten peanuts before with no adverse effect,” he tells me, “but over time, things change. Especially when it comes to allergies. She was four years old, and her mother served her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the first time, and right away—or so the story goes—Kelsey could hardly breathe. Her throat swelled up, she broke out in hives. Anaphylaxis. From that day on, she carried with her an EpiPen. Benadryl. She was always ready.
“She was always so careful about eating peanuts. We hardly ever ate out—too risky. She read the label on everything. Absolutely everything,” he says. “She wouldn’t eat products that were manufactured on shared lines for fear of cross-contamination. No processed cereal, no granola bars, no crackers.”
“So what happened?” I ask, and he shakes his head and says it was an accid
ent, a horrible accident.
Nicholas Keller wasn’t hard to find. There were only twenty of them in the entire United States, and only two in Illinois. He was the first I called. Lucky guess. The commute from Andersonville to Hyde Park took a good eighty minutes: one “L” ride, two buses and a half-mile walk on foot.
I waited until evening when I knew he would be home from work. According to LinkedIn, Nicholas Keller is a financial adviser, a fact he later confirms in the foyer of his home, small talk before I dive into the reason for my visit. He seems to be a pretty straitlaced guy, not quite what I would have imagined for Kelsey Bellamy. And yet, as the saying goes, opposites attract.
“I went to grammar school with Kelsey,” I lie, “in Winchester.”
“You’re from Winchester?” he asks.
I say that I am. Winchester, Massachusetts. I add in, “Go Red Sox,” because I don’t know a thing about Boston other than they have a decent baseball team. And they drink tea, supposedly.
“You don’t have that whole Boston accent like Kelsey did,” he says, and I tell him how I’m an army brat, how our stay in Massachusetts only lasted a short time.
“Fort Devens?” he asks, and I nod my head and say, “Yeah,” even though I’m not quite sure what I’m saying yes to. I tell him I went to fourth grade with Kelsey. “Fourth or...” I pause, feign thinking, “Fifth, maybe? I can’t remember for sure.”
My eyes take in the flat, a home that is all man. A bachelor pad. He tells me that they planned to move in here together after the wedding, he and Kelsey. They had purchased the unit, but were living apart in their separate sides of the city while it underwent renovation—she sharing an apartment with a roommate in Andersonville, he in a midrise in Bridgeport. The building was quite downtrodden the first time they laid eyes on it, a warehouse converted to loft apartments. But still, it had all the elements they were looking for in a new home: the expansive rooms, exposed pipes and ductwork, brick walls, wood cladding. And Kelsey had a vision, though she died before having a chance to see it through. Instead, what remained was a poorly furnished space with dirty dishes in the sink and laundry on the floor. And an inconsolable fiancé.