Don't You Cry (28 page)

The room turns darker, the ceiling illuminated like a nighttime sky, my mother's craven smile flecked across the drywall like a constellation. I'm five years old and all around me the world is black. It's nighttime still and I'm asleep in my big-boy bed, senseless to the touch of a hesitant hand that strokes my hair in the darkness, heedless of my mother's hurting words breathed into my ear before she goes.
You deserve so much more than me.

But I hear them now, words that ease their way into my anamnesis as the line between this life and the next softens and blurs.

And I fall.

Quinn

We stand on the street corner. There are men and women in uniform scuttling all around us: policemen, paramedics, detectives. They move quickly, trotting between gathering spots and meeting points: their cars, the inside of the single-story stucco building, a makeshift command post where Detective Robert Davies stands, telling the others what to do. The storage facility is cordoned off with yellow caution tape. Police Line Do Not Cross, it says. And yet I stand there beneath a thick, scratchy wool blanket and watch a dozen or more men and women in uniform cross behind that line. I watch them go in, and then later, I watch as they emerge, toting a form on a stretcher, strapped to the gurney with elastic bands and covered in a blanket.

Esther.

Dusk is falling quickly. The cars on the streets mushroom in number, from the usual daytime congestion to the bumper-to-bumper, bottleneck traffic of rush hour in Chicago, further aggravated by brouhaha on the side of the street: the policemen, the paramedics, the detectives, which passing cars pause to see, further holding up traffic. The cursory cars stare at me, standing there beneath the scratchy wool blanket, holding an ice pack to my head. They stare at Esther being removed from the storage facility. They stare at a news crew complete with microphones and cameras, men and women made to remain behind a police line where they can't reach the detectives, the storage facility employee—who garners his own scratchy, wool blanket—or me.

Car horns blare.

In Chicago, in November, dusk falls before five o'clock. The sun sets in the west, out in suburbia, somewhere above my mother and father's split-level home, taking with it the sun, leaving behind scant traces of light and a cobalt sky. Beside me, Ben stands, his arm on my shoulder, though I can hardly feel its weight. I don't know how he got here; I can't remember calling. But maybe I did.

I can do little but stare at Esther on the gurney as she tries to push herself up to a sitting position with little to no strength. The paramedic places a firm but gentle hand on her shoulder and commands her not to move. “Stay still,” he says, and, “Relax.”

Easier said than done.

Esther has been held captive in this storage facility for five long days. For five days she has been denied food, and only teased with water the one time her captor passed through.

“She was there. Genevieve,” Esther tells me, and I'm not sure if she was really there or if it was only a dream, an illusion, a trick played on Esther by her own mind. “She gave me water. Lukewarm water, for torture, a tease, a way to prolong what should have been a certain death.” Esther laid there on the concrete floors for days, cold, alone and terrified. That's what she said to me as I laid there, too, on the floor with her, waiting for paramedics to arrive, wrapping my body around hers to try and keep her warm. She had no idea what day it was, or what time. She was covered in her own bodily waste, and in her mouth was a gag so that she couldn't cry out or scream. There was little the storage facility worker could do, though he called 911 and cranked the heat, trying to get the temperature in the building to rise so that she'd stop palpitating. But it didn't rise. Not fast enough, anyway. We wrapped Esther in our own sweaters and coats, anything we could find to bring her warmth. The man offered trifling bits of water, pressing a bottle to her lips, though he cautioned that too much would make her sick. I didn't know one way or the other, though if it were up to me I would have let her drink the whole darn thing.

And then the paramedics arrived, and the police, and the facility employee and I were sent outside.

There on the street curb Ben wraps his arm around me again and draws me near. I'm shaking, from cold, from fear. Ben tells me this as I lean into him, and beg the wind to quit. “You're shaking,” he says. My hair whips around my head, the plunging temperatures chilling me to the bone. Tonight we're expected to get snow, the first few flurries of the season. Nothing that will stick, but still snow. I'm thinking of the radiator in Esther's and my little apartment, of whether or not it will be enough to warm the rooms. I'm thinking about the apartment itself, with all of Esther's and my belongings tucked inside. I fold my head onto bent knees and begin to cry. A quiet cry. A tear or two that dribble, unchecked, from my eyes. I don't think Ben sees.

I won't go home tonight; tonight I will stay with Esther.

“She's asking for you,” a voice says, and as I turn, there is the detective, Robert Davies.

“For me?” I ask, somehow surprised, and my gaze follows his to where Esther and her gurney are parked inside the ambulance with a single door open wide. An EMT attends to her, administering fluids. Soon she will be ushered to the hospital for a further examination and there she will spend the night.

I cross the police staging area and draw near the ambulance door. “How is she doing?” I ask the paramedic who presses a stethoscope to Esther's heart for a listen and tells me that she'll be fine. I can't yet look into Esther's eyes. There are no wounds that I can see, no gashes or blood, and yet I imagine that everything is broken on the inside.

“I haven't been a very good roommate,” I confess, peering sideways at her, and Esther's jaded face turns confused. In that moment she looks so puny to me, undernourished and scared. Delicate in a way I never knew she could be. Her eyes look tired, her hair—oleaginous and filthy—lying too long over her bony shoulders. It needs to be trimmed. I reach out a hand and stroke that hair, finding it impossible to believe that just twenty-four hours ago I was sure she was stalking me, that she was trying to take my life.

But now I see: not my Esther. No. Esther would never do anything to hurt me.

Only now do I know it's true.

“What do you mean?” she asks, her voice nearly a whisper. She's all but lost her voice. She holds a hand to her throat; it hurts. “You're a good roommate, Quinn, you are. You found me,” she breathes, “you saved me,” and at that word
saved
she begins to cough.

“We don't have to talk right now,” I say to her. “You should rest,” but as I turn to go, she reaches for my hand.

“Don't go,” she says, and I take a deep breath and admit to the things I've done, how I riffled through her bedroom once, twice, three times, how I found things I know she never wanted me to see. I don't have to tell her what I found; she knows. She nods knowingly and I voice a name:
Jane Girard.
Esther's new name. I also confess that she got a phone call from a woman named Meg, a woman replying to her ad in the
Reader
, a woman who wanted to be her roommate instead of me. I try not to be sensitive; Esther has been through enough. And yet it hurts when I tell her this, when I admit to knowing she wanted to replace me with another roommate.

“Oh, Quinn,” she says, and with whatever strength she has, she squeezes my hand. “The roommate was for you,” she says, five words that leave me utterly confused. “I was the one who was going to leave.”

And then she explains.

When Esther was a little girl, only a year or so old, her sister drowned. She died. Esther didn't know a thing about her sister, though there were photos that she'd seen, and also a story that was imparted to her over the years: they were in a hotel room, Esther, her mother and sister, Genevieve, and when Genevieve was left alone in the bathroom for a minute or two, she sunk under the bathwater and died. The reason she was left alone in the room? Esther. That's the story she was told, though her mother always finished with this addendum:
It's not your fault, Esther. You were only a baby. You couldn't have known.

And yet Esther grew up believing it was her fault. She also grew up feeling like a piece of her was missing. Because of her, her sister was dead. The grief was hard to handle; she sought help, a psychologist in the city, the one whose business card I found: Thomas Nutting. He helped, but only ever a little bit, never enough. And the grief, it came and it went time and again, weighing Esther down. She couldn't breathe. Until the day her mother admitted to her that Genevieve was never really dead. “She'd lied to me,” Esther says. “She lied to everyone. I could never forgive her for what she'd done.”

And Esther, who does everything one hundred and ten percent, decided to find Genevieve, and she did. She tells me she found her, about a year and a half ago. She located her on an adoption site online, and the two of them made plans to meet. What Esther imagined was a happy family reunion. She was filled with glee.

Instead, the reunion was suffused with blackmail and threats. Genevieve planned to expose their mother for what she'd done: the adoption, the cover-up, the abandonment. She started stalking her, calling her phone over and over and over again, though twice Esther had her number changed. Genevieve kept finding her. She showed up at her apartment door; she sent her letters. But Esther wouldn't let it happen; she couldn't be a part of exposing their mother no matter how upset she was. Genevieve said she wanted to be a happy little family, but Esther knew that could never be. And so Esther planned to disappear. She changed her name; she got a passport. She wanted to leave and begin somewhere new, a fresh start without her mother and Genevieve.

“I couldn't just abandon you like that,” she says to me. “I didn't want to leave you alone. The roommate,” she explains, “was for you.”

Esther was interviewing roommates to find the perfect one for me.

She wanted to make sure I was okay before she could leave. Now that sounds like something Esther would do.

“But then Genevieve began sending letters.” They were harmless at first, she says, but always odd. Most of them she threw away, not really thinking Genevieve had it in her to make good on the threats. Genevieve was screwed up, that much she knew, but she was sure she was simply an annoyance. Harmless. Until the letter came where she admitted to having killed Kelsey.

“Kelsey,” Esther says, and with this begins to cry. It was her fault, she believed, that Kelsey was dead. Dead by association. Kelsey hadn't done a single thing wrong. “That's when I knew I had to go to the police. This was out of my control. It had gone too far.” And she admits to me that maybe her mother wasn't wrong, after all. Maybe she was right to get rid of Genevieve.

Saturday night, the night the last note arrived, she contacted Mrs. Budny to have the locks on our apartment door changed so that Genevieve couldn't let herself inside and do something to harm me, too. Esther was trying to protect me. She called Detective Davies and told him they needed to meet; she had something to show him. The note.

And it's in that moment that everything makes perfect sense.

That night after Esther locked the doors and climbed into bed, Genevieve rang the buzzer over and over and over again, and when Esther refused to answer, she appeared at her bedroom window and towed her away. “Either you come,” she told Esther as she dragged her down the fire escape, or she would hurt me, too. She had a photograph to prove it: me walking down a city street in my purple sweater, one Genevieve slipped into the paper shredder before they left. She'd been following me. Esther was trying to protect me.

Esther had no idea where they were headed, but she knew this: Genevieve was trying to pass herself off as Esther. “She was trying to be me,” she says, “in the hopes that our mother would love her more.
You were always her favorite
, she said, but how would I know? I was only a baby when she went away,” she cries.

For five long days and five nights Esther laid on that concrete floor, breathing through her nose because the gag in her mouth made it impossible for air to pass through.
There can't be two of us, now can there?
Genevieve said before locking Esther in the storage facility.
That would just be weird.
And so Genevieve did away with Esther so that she could be Esther.
EV
. Esther Vaughan.

It's then that Detective Robert Davies reappears with Esther's cell phone in his hand. Esther's cell phone, which he confiscated earlier for his techies to review. “It's for you,” he says to Esther with a rigid, weary sort of smile, and asks if she feels up to taking the call. Esther nods her head weakly and, peering toward me, asks if I'll hold the phone for her. “I'm tired,” she confesses, a disclosure which is plain to see. “I'm just so tired.”

“Of course,” I say, leaning in close, pressing the phone to Esther's ear, close enough that I can hear every word that is exchanged over the call. It's her mother, Esther's mother, the one from which she's been estranged all these years.

From Esther comes a great big sigh of relief at the sound of her mother's voice, and then she begins to weep. “I thought I had lost you,” she says, and Esther's mother, also crying, says the same. “I thought I had lost you, too.” Apologies are offered; promises are made. A clean sweep. A fresh start.

I don't eavesdrop, not per se, and yet standing within hearing range, I gather this. After Genevieve locked Esther inside the storage facility, she sought their mother out. Esther's mother and Genevieve's mother. She threatened her; she told her Esther was dead. A boy from the neighborhood saved her, giving his own life for hers. “Alex Gallo,” she says. “Do you remember him?” Esther shakes her head; she doesn't remember him. “He's a hero—” I hear Esther's mother's voice through the phone, along with these conclusive words “—he saved me. If it wasn't for him, I'd be dead.”

And then there's an interlude—a brief interlude which is full of sobbing and grief—before she decisively says, “Genevieve will never bother us again,” for as it turns out, Genevieve will spend the rest of her life behind bars for a murder charge.

“We need to get her to the hospital,” the EMT says, and I nod my head okay. I pull the phone from Esther's ear and tell the woman on the other end of the line that Esther will call her back just as soon as she can. I promise Esther that I will be there; I'm following right behind. She doesn't have to do this alone. I'm here.