On the grave is an offering of flowers, black-eyed Susans pulled from someone else’s lawn, nothing more than withered-up seed heads lying on the ground. Bird food masquerading as flowers. But who would leave flowers here, beside this grave? Far as I know, no one comes to visit any of these graves, other than on the annual Halloween cemetery walk, meant to be spooky and not commemorative in any sort of way. Strange, if you ask me.
Pearl drops to her knees in the sodden lawn and picks at the black-eyed Susan stems. She runs her fingers over the chiseled letters, slowly, thoughtfully, as if memorizing their details, the slope of the G, the curlicue e, the hurtling V. I stand a foot or two back, watching, seeing a sadness in her eyes and thinking to myself that it is sad. Knowing that a little girl has died. It’s sad whether or not either of us ever knew Genevieve. I’ve heard the stories; nearly everyone has heard the stories. But I’ll never know Genevieve. Pearl will never know Genevieve. But still, it’s depressing, thinking that she’s down there, just a rotting corpse, lying beneath this spot where we now stand. It’s depressing and weird.
But then things get even more weird.
Pearl, kneeling down on the wet lawn, now lies down. She folds over sideways, in the fetal position, and lies on Genevieve’s grave. As if holding the little, dead girl. As if embracing her. As if comforting her in some, odd way.
She says to me, “Alex. Come here, too,” and I do, but I can’t bring myself to lie down in a cemetery. Instead, I sit. Or rather, I squat. I squat down on the lawn so that my calves begin to burn and I listen as Pearl begins to recite a prayer for the dead Genevieve.
“Now I lay me down to sleep,” she says, and I credit empathy and compassion for the tears that drip from Pearl’s eyes, but maybe there’s more to it than that.
Maybe she’s just plain crazy, though it doesn’t make me like her any less.
In some weird way, it might just make me like her more.
Quinn
“Slow down,” Ben says to me as I sit on a tweed Breuer kitchen chair and he presses a bandage to my hand. “Tell me what happened.” His face is close, a measly six inches away, so that I can smell the soy sauce on his breath when he speaks.
There are dried tears clinging to my cheeks. My hand is covered in blood.
On the kitchen chair, I tremble. In fear and because I’m cold. It’s cold in the room. There’s a blanket spread across my lap, a chunky blue throw. I have no clue how it got there. Somehow or other, I’m missing a shoe. My shirt is torn at the sleeve, right where that homeless man wrenched on my arm, pulling the muscles and ligaments this way and then that, the skin fiery red. Ben opens the freezer door and reaches inside for ice, filling a plastic bag with it. He lays that on my forearm and I blanch. It’s cold.
There are three chairs blockading the front door at my request. Ben never once said it was silly or stupid or asked why. He just did it, sliding the mod plaid chair across the room, scurrying into Esther’s bedroom to retrieve the IKEA desk chair.
He didn’t ask why. He just did it.
Esther’s cell sits on the table beside me, the message still there when we press the Home button to revive the phone.
Payback’s a bitch, it says, the text coming from some unknown number.
“She’s watching me,” I say to him as he pours me a glass of red wine and sits at the table opposite me on his own chair. His eyes are warm, a nice contrast to my cold.
“Drink this,” Ben says. “It’ll help calm your nerves.” He slides the cup across the table to me. It isn’t in a fancy wine glass. Rather, a red plastic cup. A smart decision on Ben’s part, considering my current state. My hands shake as they lift the cup. Under the table, Ben’s hand covers my knee. His touch is warm and reassuring. Soothing.
I say it again. “She’s watching me.”
Esther is watching me.
Ben and Priya were feasting on dim sum at some dive in Chinatown when I called, hysterical and crying. “What do you mean you can’t find the file?” he said on the phone to me. “I left it on your desk this afternoon.” Then he said to Priya, there in the populous restaurant on Cermak so that I could hear his crafty words over the noise, “I’m so sorry, babe. There’s been a mix-up at work. A missing file. I have to go.”
And then he left Priya in Chinatown, and brought me takeout: crispy sesame chicken and an egg roll to boot. And a bottle of red wine. He arrived in the doorway, his face overcome with signs of worry: the trenches of his forehead, the concerned eyes. He wore a smile, but it was utterly bogus, meant to bolster my mood.
“I got here as fast as I could,” he said, his voice bleeding with sympathy. He’d changed from his office attire into something far less formal than what I was used to seeing him in at work—jeans and a heather-gray hooded sweatshirt. But his hair was perfect and he oozed the crisp, cool cologne that made me dizzy and numb. Euphoric.
“I hope Priya wasn’t mad,” I said when he arrived, but he shrugged it off and said it didn’t matter, anyway. Truth be told, I didn’t really care whether or not Priya was mad; I was just so happy he’d come. So relieved. They were just finishing up their meal, and then Priya planned to bolt, anyhow, thanks to a heavy dose of homework. That’s what Ben tells me. He offered to help—or keep her company at least—but she’d said no. “She had too much to do,” said Ben, and I made believe I saw in his eyes a certain satisfaction that I needed him, that unlike Priya, I couldn’t do this alone. I needed his help and his company.
And so he washed and bandaged my hand. He moved the chairs. He got ice for my arm. He poured me wine.
My knight in shining armor.
And I told him what happened: about my visit with Nicholas Keller, the commute home, the creepy homeless man touching my hair, the text message on the cell phone.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to see Nicholas Keller?” he asks, sitting before me, a look of concern and kindness is his eyes. He runs a hand along my arm before finding its way back into his lap.
“I didn’t want to bother you,” I admit, and it’s true. Ben has been so good to spend so much time and energy helping me figure out where Esther has gone and what she’s up to. She’s his friend, yes, but it seems somehow like this is more my problem than his. But going to see Nicholas was also an impulsive decision on my part. I hardly knew where I was going until I walked out my front door and hopped on the Red Line, getting ferried underground. It wasn’t so much of a well-hatched plan as it was a spontaneous one, one that suddenly feels stupid. I should have asked Ben to tag along. I should have sat beside him at Nicholas Keller’s kitchen table and the both of us should have heard with our own two ears how Esther killed his fiancé.
Ben leans in even closer, his hand now kneading the denim of my jeans so that my barely beating heart almost completely stops working. “I would have gone with you. It wouldn’t have been a bother. That’s what friends do,” he says, and I nod my head sluggishly, thinking of course this is what friends do. They don’t stalk each other down and make attempts on their life.
And then I repeat for a third time or maybe a fourth, “She’s watching me,” and he says, “Maybe,” and then in that take-charge no-nonsense way that I like, “We need to call the police.” He releases his hold on my kneecap and sits back in his chair. But suddenly he feels far away, too far, the six-or eight-inch distance now transforming into eighteen, the slope of his body concave versus convex. I find myself leaning in, hoping to bridge that gap. Come back, Ben.
“I’ve already done that,” I say. “I went to the station. I filed a missing-persons report,” and I fill him in on my exchange with the officer at the front desk who asked for Esther’s name, her photograph. He said they’d be in touch, but still, no one has been in touch.
“Maybe it’s time to report a crime,” he says instead, though both of us know we have nothing more than an unsubstantiated hunch t
o report. Just a premonition. A bad feeling.
The death of Kelsey Bellamy was ruled an accident. Since then, there’s no evidence of a crime because no crime has been committed. Not yet, anyway.
For now, it’s just an irrational fear that Esther is out to get me. Esther, my good friend, my dear roommate. I tell myself, Esther would never hurt me, but even I am not so sure.
The budding lawyer in Ben knows this better than me; he knows we don’t have anything effectual for the police. Paperwork on loss and grieving, and a petition for a change of name, cash withdrawal receipts. That’s irrelevant. It’s not illegal to change your name, or to feel sad. To take money out of your own bank account. To ask to have the locks changed on your apartment door. Esther has done nothing wrong. Or has she?
“Besides,” I say then, thinking as I stare into his hazel eyes, hoping that there I might find the answers to all my many questions, “what if we’re wrong about all this? What if this is all some stupid mistake and we call the police and turn her in? What will it do to Esther if we’re wrong? She’ll go to prison,” I tell him, my voice convulsing now as I imagine Esther spending the rest of her days behind bars when maybe, just maybe, she didn’t do anything wrong. “Esther is too kind for jail,” I tell Ben, “too nice,” but then I imagine the Esther that purposefully added peanut flour to Kelsey’s meal to end her life, and not the Esther who sings hymns in the church choir. Esther can’t possibly be both of these things.
But did Esther do something wrong? I don’t know for certain. I ask the question out loud for Ben. “Did she kill her? Did Esther kill Kelsey Bellamy?”
Ben shrugs. “I don’t know for sure, but it looks to me like she did,” he says, confirming the same suspicion that now takes over my mind. Esther killed Kelsey and now she’s trying to kill me, too.
“But what if we’re wrong and we call the police with this false claim that Esther is a murderer?” I ask Ben. “We’ll ruin her life.”
Ben mulls this over.
“I went to high school with a guy,” he says after some time. “Brian Abbing. Rumor had it he broke into some pricey bridal shop one night, and made off with a few thousand bucks from the register. The back window was smashed. The place was tossed, shattered mannequins and torn dresses everywhere. There was no proof that Brian did anything, but still, people pointed fingers.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Someone saw him hanging out down the street. And he was just sort of that kid, the kind of kid who people like to pick on. He never dated, he talked with a lisp, he had no friends other than Randy Fukui, who was just as much of a hermit as Brian. They did everything wrong—they had the wrong clothes, wrong music, wrong hair. They talked about video games all day, and made friends with the old shop teacher, some Vietnam vet who talked about flamethrowers and rocket launchers all the damn time.”
“People made fun of them because they didn’t like their clothes?” I ask. I’m listening but I’m only sort of listening.
“It was high school,” Ben says, and I think, Enough said. I hated high school. Everyone hates high school except for those in the catty and shallow cliques—the lacrosse players and the girls of the pom-pom squad—who roam the halls, making others feel unworthy. I couldn’t wait to get out of high school when I was there.
“What happened,” I ask, “to Brian?” My heart suddenly goes out to Brian. I was teased for many things as a teenager, mainly my utter stupidity. It’s not a good thing being stupid when you’re also a blonde. I was called many things: banana head, buttercup, Tinker Bell. The blond jokes were endless.
“Police never could figure out who did it, not soon enough, anyway. There was no evidence, no fingerprints, and so it remained an open case. But the kids put him on trial, anyway. They pointed fingers, they called him names. Even Randy stopped talking to him. He couldn’t walk to math class without half the school calling him a crook or a klepto. By the time the police nabbed the real culprit, some six months later, Brian had already climbed to the top of some cell phone tower and jumped.”
“He killed himself?”
“He killed himself.”
“Wow,” I say. It seems kind of extreme for me, but I guess that’s the kind of thing you never get over, the name-calling and finger-pointing. Sometimes when I close my eyes at night I can still hear my entire econ class laughing because every time the teacher called on me, it was as if I’d gone mute. Earth to Quinn...
“Same thing could happen to Esther,” Ben says. “It doesn’t matter if she was exonerated from charges, if charges were even made. People would always look at her and think, Murderer, whether or not she is,” and I nod my head listlessly, knowing that’s exactly what I’m thinking, too.
Esther is a murderer.
“Once a murderer, always a murderer,” I say then as I sip from my plastic wine cup with shuddering hands, spilling tiny red droplets along the tabletop. Red like blood. “Esther would be hurt if it turned out we were wrong.”
I’m not sure it’s the best time to be worried about Esther’s feelings, but I can’t help myself. I am. Though of course if we’re right, then I might be the one who ends up hurt, though in an entirely different way than Esther. But still, I imagine Esther all alone at the top of a cell phone tower just like Brian Abbing, about to free-fall to the ground below, and I know we can’t call the police. Not yet, anyway. Not before we know more.
“There’s no reliable evidence, nothing tangible, no witnesses or hearsay,” Ben says, reaching for a napkin and wiping my mess away. If only everything were so simple. He agrees with me now and takes back his advice of going to the police, and the decision—whether good or bad—is made not to call.
Instead, we sit at the kitchen table in nervous silence. Ben unearths the crispy sesame chicken from a paper bag and hands me a fork. He refills my wine and pours himself a cup and then scoots his chair closer to mine, and under the small kitchen table, we touch.
The first glass of wine is, in a word, ghastly. We sit taking small, pensive sips from our plastic cups of merlot. We ignore the way my hands convulse as I raise the cup up to my lips and sip. What I want to do is scream. I want to scream loud enough that all the neighbors can hear, that Mrs. Budny can hear, but especially so that Esther can hear. Why? I want to scream. Why are you doing this to me?
By the second cup of wine, we leave the kitchen table and move into the living room where we sit side by side on the small sofa. A joke is made and we both force a stilted laugh, thinking in the backs of our minds we shouldn’t be laughing at a time like this. But the laughing is contagious, one laugh which leads to two and then three. The mood in the room becomes lighter and the world takes on an air that is no longer all Debbie Downer. It feels good.
By the time a third cup is poured I can hardly remember why my shirtsleeves are torn and on the palm of my hand is a giant gauze bandage and strips of medical tape. By the fourth I’m quite certain our legs became tangled on the small sofa like a Jenga game—his on top of mine, on top of his, legs which we keep pulling out and rearranging on top of one another, trying to get comfortable. It isn’t in the least bit libidinous, but rather cuddlesome and affectionate, something that takes my mind off this week’s strange turn of events that’s transported me from a normal existence to one which has gone completely haywire and berserk. We talk about things other than Esther. We talk about Anita, our boss at work, the one paid to deal with the miscreant project assistants like Ben and me. We debate things like the death penalty and assisted suicide, whether or not orange candies really are the worst. They are (Ben disagrees, though of course he’s wrong). At some point Ben asks about my love life, or complete lack thereof (my words, not his), and I grimace and bring up Priya instead, fueled by alcohol to ask the question that’s been living at the back of my mind for months.
“What do you see in her?” I say audaciously, though it isn’t meant to be triv
ializing or mean, but comes out that way, anyway, and I thank the wine for that as I thank the wine for many things: for the fact that Ben is here, snuggled beside me; for the fact that I have no misgivings about the way my hand reaches out to grab his, not worrying once that he won’t reciprocate the gesture; for the fact that for the first time in days, I tingle with happiness instead of fear.
“Everything,” Ben says, and I feel my heart sink—my hand starts a slow withdrawal from his—only to rise to the surface again as he sighs and says then, “Nothing,” and I’m not sure which to believe: everything, nothing or something in between.
“I’ve been with her half my life,” he confesses to me, staring at me with those eyes of his, his voice drowsy from the wine, his face close enough to mine to feel his breath when he speaks. “I don’t know what it’s like to not be with Priya,” and I think that I get it. I think that I do, this sense of familiarity and comfort that slips into a relationship over time, completely trampling all excitement and passion. I don’t get it personally, because of course my longest relationship lasted a mere seventy-two hours, but I get it. I see the way my own parents no longer kiss; they don’t hold hands. I watch the way my father sleeps on the guest bed lest my mother’s chronic insomnia keep them both up all night. Ben and Priya aren’t even married and already there’s no excitement, no passion. At least that’s what I’d like to believe, but who am I to say what goes on in their private life.
But I don’t want to think about that right now; I don’t want to think about Priya. Instead, I press myself closer to Ben so that we sit side by side, our legs running in parallel lines, plunked on the coffee table, my ankle crossed with his.
As if this is normal. As if this is something we do.
I have no idea how he comes to spend the night, but I’m so glad he does.
THURSDAY