Don't You Cry (13 page)

Alex

Morning begins like every other day: waking up at the crack of dawn, chugging down a Mountain Dew, slipping past a passed-out Pops on my way to work. My mind tries to make sense of the footsteps that followed me home last night in vain. Was someone there—and if so, then who?—or was it simply my brain playing a trick on me, a figment of the imagination? I don't know. Already this morning I'm predicting how the day at the café will go, and I'm dreading every single minute of it, from Priddy harassing me for my persistent tardiness, to me, wriggling out of the sandy jacket and getting down to work, washing mounds of dishes left behind by cooks in the sink, the water so hot it scalds my hands. Red and Braids bellyaching about the meagerness of their tips. Broken dishes. Spilled food. Eight hours of feeling like a loser.

My only hope as I lumber along the restive shores of Lake Michigan on the way to greet Priddy is that Pearl will be there, sitting at the window of the café, eyes again on the office of Dr. Giles. This is the only thing that gets me through the monotonous, repetitive trek to work, through the dismal prospect of the next eight hours on my feet, scurrying around the café, gathering other people's used forks and knives in my hand. Washing their dishes. Wiping spilled food off the tables and floors. Day after day after day, knowing in the back of my mind that this will never end.

I continue on along the lake, past the stationary carousel, and head into town.

There's an Amtrak station in town, not too far from the beach. A half mile, a quarter mile, I don't know. I can't say. Just on the other side of the sand-strewn beach parking lot. It's small, a waiting area and the ticket booth, with a few bike racks that remain empty at this time in the morning. There isn't even a john. The train passes through a couple times a day heading one of two ways: Grand Rapids—eastbound—or Chicago—westbound. Today it's eastbound, the Pere Marquette to Grand Rapids, Michigan. I've never been there before.

The station is quiet when I pass by on my daily morning trek to work, only a couple riders climbing on board for the two-and-a-half-hour ride. Another stepping off, having just arrived from Chicago. They carry duffel bags and suitcases in their hands. Some have hands that are empty, just a purse strung over the shoulder or the wallet in the pocket of their jeans. It's a short commute either way, the kind you can pull off, round trip, in a day. There and back again in the very same day.

And that, it seems, is just what Pearl's done as I watch her drop down the large steps of the Superliner and set foot into town.

Again.

She's gone and come back again, and it seems that I'm the only one who knows.

Turns out, I'm none the wiser for it, though I can't help but wonder why.

* * *

I wait all morning at the café for her to show.

The day is generally quiet. The morning crowd—a word I use loosely,
crowd
—is made up of old folks mostly, those who don't have to scurry off to work or school. In time they disappear and are replaced with the school district's bus drivers who, in time, disappear, too.

And that's when Pearl appears.

It's all as it was the day she first arrived. She stands with poise, waiting for a table, and then, when it's her turn, asks for a spot by the window, out of which she can watch and stare, taking in Dr. Giles's office across the way, the few, random pedestrians who come and go up and down the street.

I surveil her as she peels the scarf from around her neck and removes the hat, setting them both on an empty chair to her left. She shakes out of a coat and drapes it over the back of her chair, and I think to myself:
Don't stop there
, imagining the way that on the lake's shore she stripped down to her underwear. But of course she does. She asks for coffee when Red arrives, sits in her chair and crosses her legs at the ankle, the Ugg boots wet as if she'd been foot-slogging through the lake all day. There's sand on them, too, wet sand, adhered to the sheepskin like burs.

Red
is a big girl, her arms squashy like bread dough, a chalky white that's been hidden from sunlight by a cheesecloth towel, the yeast inside making it rise. Her voice, her mannerism, everything about her, is raunchy and crass. And then there's the smell of her, something along the lines of feet, stinky feet, a miasma of feet. Her thighs rub against each other as she walks, overlapping.

But then there is Pearl, the antithesis of everything Red is, whether or not she's as mad as a March hare. She's older than me, but that doesn't matter these days. Five, maybe ten years older. Enough that she carries a poise and finesse about her that most eighteen-year-old girls don't have.

But not too old that it's weird for me to stare.

As Red passes by again, Pearl orders her meal. Her voice is quiet, nothing more than a whisper. Red leans in close to ask what she said. From where I stand I tune out all the other noise so I can hear Pearl's somnolent voice over the chaos of the café—the ding of a cash register, the opening and closing of a door, hushed music coming from a CD player. It's not that she's shy. No, that's not it. Instead, it's an act of diplomacy, a subtlety, tact. Not screaming over the noise, because that would be crass.

Red disappears to shout the order to one of the short-order cooks—her voice all gritty and gravelly like someone who smokes too much, which, like Braids, she does, the two of them teeter-tottering outside all day on their rotating smoke breaks—while Priddy gives me the death stare, telling me to get to work. Talk about ironic. Sexism is what it is. I'm being harassed. I should sue. And yet, I return to wiping tables down, swiping the dirty dishes off and into a dishpan where they plink, glass on glass, silver on silver.

The November sun blazes through the window as it so often does around this same time every day, at noon, crossing over the meridian at its highest peak and right into our space. I watch as patrons' placid faces begin to glare, eyes squinting, hands on head as if in salute, blinded by the light.

If it weren't for the sun I wouldn't have approached the window in the first place. But I do, crossing the room to tug at the strings on the Venetian blinds, lowering them just enough to keep the sunlight at bay, and yet not restrict Pearl's view of the street. That's the last thing I want to do. To take away her view. I know how much she likes it, staring out the window, monitoring Dr. Giles's office from here.

It's her shampoo that I smell first—or lotion, maybe hair spray, how the heck would I know?—some sort of blend of grapefruit and mint that stings my olfactory receptors. Truth be told, it also makes me weak in the knees. I'm not one to swoon. But this time I do. My hands tremble, glassware jiggling in the dishpan so that I set it down so nothing will break. I wonder to myself if she could be the woman, the ethereal figure, living at the periphery of my dreams? The one who comes to me at night and begs of me,
Let's go...

“I've seen you before,” she says as I approach, her words halfhearted and meandering, her eyes never looking at me.

Is she talking to me? I look around to be sure.

I'm the only one here.

She says it again, different this time but still the same. “I saw you the other day.”

“I know,” I say, my voice flickering like a lightbulb that's about to conk out and die. A tiny voice inside my head reminds me that I'm a chicken. A loser. A pansy. The closest I ever get to beautiful women are the nudie girls from magazines who live in my closet so that Pops can't see. I've dated exactly three girls in my life, not a one that lasted for longer than two weeks.

“By the beach,” she says.

“I know,” I say. “I saw you, too.”

It's the best that I can do.

From behind me, I hear a little boy's mother tell him to sit down and eat. I turn to see. As he leans across the table to touch his mother's hand, she pulls back quickly, and snaps, “Don't touch me.” It's emphatic, the way she says it, a proclamation that reminds me of my own mother.
Don't touch me, Alex.
But this mother's words come with a postscript. “Your hands are covered in syrup,” she says, handing the boy a napkin.

My mother never told me why she didn't want me to touch her. It was simply,
Don't touch me.

“You could have said hi,” Pearl tells me then, drawing me away from the memories of my mother. Her eyes run this time from down to up, taking in my black gym shoes, my cheap pleated work pants and uniform shirt and bow tie, and I think,
What do I say to this?
All logic would have me ask why she was swimming in the bitter cold lake in the middle of November. Why she didn't have a bathing suit, a beach towel? Doesn't she know about hypothermia and freezing to death? Frostbite?

But that would be lame.

“Do you have a name?” I ask instead, trying hard to play it cool, and she says, without ever once looking at me, “I do.”

And then I wait, on the edge of my proverbial seat, for her to tell me what it is. I wait so long that I start to form ideas in my head: Mallory, Jennifer, Amanda.

But then her food arrives—Red elbowing me out of the way to get through with the hot plate—and just like that she starts to eat, staring out the spotted window at pedestrians on the street, completely incognizant of the sun in her eyes or me, lingering a half step behind her, waiting for a name.

She has a name.

But she doesn't tell me what it is.

Quinn

At work I find that I can concentrate on nothing but Esther. Little does she know it, but she occupies every spare moment of my time. My phone rings and the first thought on my mind is Esther. Is it Esther? But it's not Esther. I hear my name called over the PA system, beckoning me to reception, where I run quickly down the gleaming hardwood floors of the law firm, certain it's Esther, that she's there at the receptionist's desk, waiting for me, but instead I see a bombastic attorney sending me to deliver documents to the office of some expert witness to be analyzed. I scurry quickly off on my task, my mind still consumed with Esther, feeling hurt and worried all at the same time. It comes to me in random moments, this fact that Esther is trying to get rid of me, a betrayal that is sometimes overshadowed for this unmistakable feeling that something is wrong, that something has happened to her.

The minute I return to the law firm from my errand, I seek out Ben and come to learn that he's at a stalemate in his search, as well. Though he's made attempts to track down a Mr. or Mrs. Vaughan, his search turned up empty. Ben is seated at his own office cube when I come in from behind, startling him in his swivel chair. He rubs at his head and sighs, losing hope like me. On the computer screen before him are three tormenting words:
no records found
.

“No word from Esther?” he asks.

I shake my head and say, “No word.”

I am not the only one who finds it impossible to focus on the tedium and stupidity of work. I couldn't care less right now about things such as Bates labels and document productions and what kind of deadline some deranged attorney needs me to photocopy thousands of documents by. It all seems so frivolous and petty when Esther is missing.

I'm not the only one feeling frustrated by this strange turn of events. Ben feels it, too, and there in his cheerless cube we lament on how impossible it is to focus on work when work is the farthest thing from our minds. We make a pact to leave and by two-fifteen we both phony up an illness at work: food poisoning. We grope our midsections and claim to have eaten something rotten, putrid, rank.
The roast beef
, I say, and Ben blames his chopped chicken salad. We threaten to vomit, and it's immediate, almost, the way we're told to go home.
Just go.

And so we do.

We share a cab, my treat because Ben is trekking out to my apartment in Andersonville to help me sort this mystery out. He offers to split the fare with me—of course he does, my very own knight in shining armor (he just doesn't know it yet)—but I say no. The cabbie hurls us through the streets of Chicago, tossing us this way and that on the torn leather seat. He leaves the Loop and hops on Lake Shore Drive, exiting at Foster. I watch Lake Michigan out the filthy car window as we pass, the water blue, as is the sky, but that doesn't mean either of them are the slightest bit warm. It's a clear day, the kind of day where they say you can see all the way to Michigan from the top of the Willis Tower. I don't know what you can see, just the other side of the lake pouring onto the shores of some negligible town, I suppose. Outside it's cold, the wind pitiless, and though I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with our tempestuous weather, the nickname Windy City feels entirely apropos.

The cabbie reaches a good sixty miles per hour on Lake Shore Drive and though we're both scared as all get-out, in the backseat Ben and I laugh. It feels wrong to laugh. Almost. Esther could be in real danger. But there's also a bit of desperation in it, a bit of agony and misery. It isn't a lighthearted laugh.

I'm concerned about Esther, of course, and yet there's a part of me still put off by Esther's whole lavish plot to replace me. So many of the clues point to Esther: Esther wrote the creepy notes to
My Dearest
; Esther placed the ad in the
Reader
; Esther changed her own name; Esther had a passport photo taken; Esther requested the locks be changed on our apartment door. Esther, Esther, Esther.

So why should I be worried for Esther when this is all her doing?

Also, if I don't laugh, I might just go berserk.

As we emerge from the cab on my little residential block of Farragut Avenue, the wind whips through my hair, dragging it some way other than the way which my feet need to go. It's with instinct that I grab for Ben's arm and he steadies me before I release my hold and let go.

“You okay?” he asks, and I say, “Yeah. I'm okay. It's windy.” But still, I feel his arm upon my skin. What is it that he sees in Priya, after all? Why not
me
instead of
her
?

But I can't think about that right now.

Ben goes first, and I follow closely behind, up the concrete steps, through the white front doors and into the vacuous entryway. There's nothing there but sixteen mailboxes and a dirty, gray doormat, smothered in grime and debris.

Welcome,
says the doormat, though it's placed upside down so you see it as you leave.

I have no idea what Ben and I plan to do, or how it is that we'll attempt to find Esther. But I do know that I'm happy as pie to have someone here by my side, someone practical like Ben who can help me sort through all these inane ideas running amuck in my mind. It's also lonely and I'm desperate for someone, anyone, to keep me company, for the sound of voices other than those which live inside my head. But more than anything, I'm happy it's Ben.

I gather my mail from one of the mailboxes, and up the stairwell we go, Ben in the lead, me in the rear. I'd be lying if I said I didn't stare at his tail end.

At the door I fumble with my keys, having almost forgotten that my key—the little copper thingie I've had for nearly a year—no longer fits inside the door, and I fish around in my pockets for the new one, the one I snatched from John the maintenance man's aging hands. Once inside the apartment, I kick the door closed and drop the stash of mail on the countertop and walk away, thinking nothing of it until Ben holds up a catalog for me to see.

“I have to know,” he asks, “which one of you shops here. You or Esther?” And there's a smile on his face, a teasing smile, but suddenly I feel irritated and confused. I've seen that catalog before. It's a regular in Esther's and my mailbox, the kind of thing that hits the recycle bin the moment it arrives, like the takeout menu from the deli where Esther and I both got sick. Why do we keep getting this catalog? On the front is a woman, no more than twenty years old, with some sort of occult ensemble on, a tunic dress that could be cute if it wasn't decked out in skulls and crossbones, platform heels with spikes extruding from all sides. There's a choker on her neck, black leather, pulled so taut it's a wonder she doesn't gag.

I reach out for the catalog in Ben's hand and for whatever reason flip to the reverse side to see why this catalog keeps winding up in our mailbox. Does this catalog belong to Esther? Was she a vamp in a former life? A goth? Did she dress in all black and go around clubbing under the pseudonym of Raven or Tempest or Drusilla? Did she have an odd fascination with death, a fetish for the supernatural? I don't know. I have this pesky feeling that I don't know who Esther is anymore.

But instead of seeing Esther's name there on the address label as I expect to see, it reads,
Kelsey Bellamy or current resident of 1621 W. Farragut Avenue
.

That's my apartment building, but who is Kelsey Bellamy?

I never asked Esther about her old roommate and she never said anything. It was as if she didn't exist, though I knew she did, of course. It was the reason for the vacant space, for Esther's need to fill a room once complete with life but suddenly void of it.

I have one thought then, one memory: the name etched into the wall in my bedroom closet, the forgotten fragment of a photograph bearing traces of Esther's hair, the one I found in the closet of the vacant bedroom after I'd moved in.

I hurry quickly from the room and into my bedroom. Ben follows behind asking, “Where are you going?” and there in the bedroom I show him. I slide open the doors of the reach-in closet and start pulling out items at random, tossing dresses on hangers to the floor, pushing aside a rolling suitcase I've never used, a graduation gift from my folks in case I ever had the urge to
get up and go
. Right now I have the urge to get up and go. But where?

“What are you looking for?” asks Ben as I point a quivering hand at six consequential letters placed on the drywall, scored into the popcorn walls with something like a carving knife. An hour ago they meant nothing to me, but now they do.

Kelsey.

* * *

It's all just fun and games until somebody gets hurt.

Isn't that how the saying goes?

It couldn't be more apropos.

We're sitting in my apartment, Ben on the rose-colored sofa, me on the black-and-white mod plaid chair because it seems like the right thing to do, the
unassuming
thing to do. I could have sat next to him; he'd sat first and he left me room. But that, of course, seemed foolhardy and pert. And what if after I sat, he rose and found another chair? That wouldn't be good.

No, this way I'm in the driver's seat, in the saddle, at the helm. I'm the one in control. And anyway, from the other side of the industrial iron coffee table, the view is more clear.
The better to see you with, my dear.

His light brown hair is a sleek square cut, the kind that sends him to the barber every other week for a trim. His expression has taken on that serious air as it does when he's working, completing the all-important task of Bates labeling documents like me. But instead of Bates labels, his fingers type across the keyboard quickly, and then he stares at the screen. And then he types and he stares, and he types and he stares. His feet rise up to the coffee table, his work shoes removed. His socks are black, a crew cut, pulled halfway up to his knee. He's discarded the tie and unbuttoned a button or two of a vintage oxford shirt. He wears no undershirt beneath, the skin there tanned and smooth.

I want to touch it.

And he says in a grisly, morbid sort of way, “This is weird,” and his eyes rise up to meet my eyes, which are already on his.

Outside it's nearing five o'clock. Soon our coworkers will go home, fleeing the black high-rise like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Dusk is falling quickly out the apartment windows. The close of day. I rise from the mod plaid chair to flip on a light, an arched floor lamp that fills the space with a yellow hue.

“What's weird?” I ask, and Ben says, “Listen to this.”

He clears his throat and reads. “Kelsey Bellamy, twenty-five, of Chicago, Illinois, died Tuesday, September 23, at Methodist Hospital. She was born on February 16, 1989, and moved to Chicago from her childhood home of Winchester, Massachusetts, in 2012. She worked as a substitute teacher in the Chicago Public School system for two years before her death. Kelsey is survived by her fiancé, Nicholas Keller; her parents, John and Shannon Bellamy; siblings Morgan and Emily; and countless grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. Visitation will be from 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Friday, September 26, at Palmer Funeral Home in Winchester, Massachusetts. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Food Allergy Research and Education.”

He searches for a date of the obituary: last year. September of last year, mere weeks before I moved in with Esther.
Weeks!

“Well, I'll be damned,” I say, and I think to myself,
How sad
, but also,
Holy shit
.

“Are you sure she's the one, the
right
one?
She's
the Kelsey Bellamy who used to live
here
?” And then I think,
My God!
I hope she didn't die
here
, and I have this image of a dead Kelsey Bellamy, dead on my bedroom floor. I shake the image from my mind.

“Well, I can't be sure,” says Ben, “but she's the only Kelsey Bellamy in all of Chicago that I can find. The age seems right, too. Can't imagine Esther living with a sixty-year-old.”

“I can't believe Esther didn't tell me this,” I say, but the thing is, I can. Two or three days ago, I'd have said,
No way
, but now I can't be sure. I'm starting to discover there are many things about Esther's life that I didn't know.

Esther, Jane or whoever the heck she is.

“How'd she die?” I ask.

“Doesn't say,” Ben says, “but I'm guessing...” And then his voice trails off, only to be interrupted with, “Look here,” as he scoots over to make even more room for me on the small apartment sofa. He doesn't have to ask twice, though I'm slightly offended by the amount of space he believes is needed for my rear end. He's pointing at his tablet screen as I toss a throw pillow to the ground, and slide in beside him. And there on his tablet is an image of Kelsey Bellamy.

She's lovely. That's the first thought that runs through my mind. Though not in your typical blond hair, blue eyes kind of lovely. More like a gothic lovely with jet-black hair and smoky eyes, hence the goth catalog delivered to her this afternoon. Her skin is an ashen white. It's whiter than white as if it's been slathered with baby powder—or as if, perhaps, she's a ghost, already dead. She dresses like a goth, I guess, but with a certain femininity to it—a black Lolita skirt, a ruffled blouse, black lipstick.

I have a hard time picturing Kelsey Bellamy as a substitute teacher.

“This is weird,” I say, “really weird.”

“You're telling me,” says Ben as he continues his search to see what else he can find. As we sit there—pressed together on the small apartment sofa so that our knees hover mere inches from each other, eyes staring at the same pinwheel on the same display screen as the tablet thinks, me inhaling his crisp, citrusy cologne—we come across Kelsey's Facebook page, whereby friends and family leave mournful, tear-jerking status updates about their beloved daughter, granddaughter, niece and friend, with claims made by some that Kelsey's roommate was the one responsible for her death.
A terrible accident
, some say, but others call it negligence. Some claim she should be convicted of manslaughter.
She
as in Esther.
The roommate
, they say. They say Esther—my Esther—did this. That she killed Kelsey.