Don't You Cry (4 page)

But all that said, Ingrid isn't crazy. She's about as normal as they come around here.

“Hi, Alex,” she says to me, and I reply, “Hi.”

Ingrid dresses like a fifty-year-old woman should: a bright orange sweatshirt kind of thing, and black knit pants. Around her neck, a locket and chain. In her earlobes, stud earrings. On her feet is a pair of flats.

Before Ingrid has a chance to close the door, I turn around for a quick peek. There in the storefront glass I see her, Pearl, obscured in part by the reflection of nearly everything on the opposite side of the street. What's inside and what's outside are complicated by glass, so it's no wonder that birds fly headlong into it sometimes, plummeting to their deaths on the porous concrete.

But still, through the marquee of trees and in the manifestation of half the world on one pane of glass, I see her.

Pearl.

Her eyes stare out the window, but not at me. I follow the path of Pearl's eyes to a sign that hangs with scroll brackets from the neighboring home: Dr. Giles, PhD. Licensed Psychologist.
And there he stands, Dr. Giles, with his dark, trim-cut hair and well-groomed style, waiting impatiently for a patient to appear.

Well, I'll be. She's watching him.

Does she have an appointment with Dr. Giles? Maybe. Maybe that's it. My perception shifts, but not so much that I stop thinking about her hair or her eyes, because I don't. In fact, they're there every time I so much as blink.

Ingrid closes the door, and she asks of me, “Can you lock it?”

Ingrid's home is on the small size, but more than adequate for a single occupant as I kick the door closed, turn the dead bolt, and bring Ingrid's lunch to her kitchen table. On the marble countertop is an open cardboard box, a small reserve of novels set beside it. Something to pass time. There's a knife set there, too, a professional-grade carving knife, used to slice through the packaging tape.

The television is on, a small flat-screen TV that Ingrid doesn't watch, though I can tell she's listening to it and my guess is that the sound of actors and actresses on the TV screen tricks her into feeling like she's not alone. That someone is here even if they're only make-believe. It's a spoof she plays on herself. It must be lonely, not being able to leave your own home.

The house is otherwise quiet. Once upon a time there was the sound of boisterous children and stampeding feet, but not anymore. Now those sounds are gone.

“I was hoping you'd do me a favor, Alex,” Ingrid says, drawing my eyes away from a lady on the TV screen. Her home is a crisp white: white walls, white cabinets. The floors are a contrast to the rest of the home, stained plank flooring, so dark they're almost black. Her furniture and decor are austere, shades of neutrals and gray, not much in the way of knickknacks or accessories, unlike my own home, Pops being the hoarder that he is, unable to part with anything. It's not like he collects years' worth of rubbish, piled miles high in the middle of our living room, stray cats procreating in every crevice of our home so that it burgeons with feral kittens, some living, some dead. No, not like that; not like those hoarders on TV. But he is sentimental, the type that has trouble parting with my junior-high report cards and baby teeth. I suppose this should make me feel good. Deep down I guess it does.

But it's also a painful reminder that Pops has no one else in this world but me. If I were to leave, where would he be?

“I made a shopping list,” Ingrid says, and without waiting for her to voice the words—
Will you go?
—I say, “Sure thing. Tomorrow, okay?” And she says that it is.

From a window in the kitchen of Ingrid's home, I've got a decent view straight to the inside of Dr. Giles's office. Ingrid's Cape Cod sits just above his, the window at the ideal angle to see right in. It's not a great view, but still, it's a view. As Ingrid sorts through her purse for two twenty-dollar bills and hands them to me, I catch sight of something shadowy and vague, just the movement of shapes through the glass. Someone is there. I stare, but I don't stare long. I can't. I don't want Ingrid to think I'm some Peeping Tom. Instead, my eyes meet Ingrid's and I tuck the two twenty-dollar bills into a pocket and tell her that I'll go tomorrow morning. I'll go to the grocery store in the morning. I've done this routine many times before.

I take the list, say my goodbyes and go.

The minute I emerge from Ingrid's house and step down the wide porch steps and onto the sidewalk, I see it.

The café window is now untenanted.

The girl is gone.

Quinn

I often thought that Esther was transparent, like a pane of glass. What you see is what you get. But now, sitting on the floor of her boxy bedroom, on my legs so that they've gone numb, holding the note to
My Dearest
in my hand, I think that maybe I was wrong. I've gotten it all wrong.

Maybe Esther isn't transparent, after all. Not a pane of glass but rather a toy kaleidoscope, the kind with intricate mosaics and patterns that change every time you so much as turn the edge.

It was a listing in the
Reader
that brought me to Esther.

“You can't be serious?” asked my sister, Madison, when I showed her the ad:
Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale, close to bus and train.
“You have seen the movie
Single White Female
, haven't you?” she probed from the edge of her twin-size bed, science flash cards spread out before her, proliferating like rabbits on the bedspread.

I picked up a flash card.
“You're never going to need this junk, you know?” I asked, staring at the garbled definition on the back. “Not in the real world, anyway.”

And then Madison gave me that look like she always did and said, “I have a test tomorrow,” as if that was something I didn't know.

“No shit, Sherlock,” I said, tossing the flash card back on the heaping pile. “But after high school,” I mean. “You're never going to need this crap.”

I was the last person in the world who should be giving anyone advice on anything, the least of which was education. I had graduated five months ago from college, a crappy college at that, one which didn't quite make the cut of best colleges in the US of A. But the tuition was cheap, or cheaper than its counterparts. They also let me in, the same of which couldn't be said for the other colleges to which I applied thanks to a little thing known as learning disabilities. Between the ADHD and the dyslexia, I was a lost cause. Or so said the multitude of rejection letters I received from the colleges to which I applied, with the big, red Rejected
stamp across the returned applications.

That's quite good for the self-esteem. Really, it is.

Or not.

I spent the first two of my eight semesters on academic probation. But when the dean threatened to dismiss me from school, I got my act together and cracked open a book. I also remembered to take my Ritalin from time to time, and admitted to the learning disability, which I wasn't too keen on having to do.

But still, somehow or other I managed to graduate from college with a 3.0. And yet no one needs academic advice from me, least of all Madison, my little sister, on schedule to graduate with high honors. And so I shut my mouth. On that subject at least.

I had, by the way, seen the movie
Single White Female
. Of course I had. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and I was desperate. I was twenty-two years old, five months post–college graduation and desperately in need of fleeing my parents' suburban home where they lived with my mastermind sister and her smelly guinea pig. Madison was still in high school, a science geek with a whole medical career ahead of her. That or an embalmer, maybe, with her whole morbid fascination of things that were dead. She had a taxidermy squirrel she bought on the internet with her allowance, the same thing she planned to do with the guinea pig when it finally kicked the bucket—skin and stuff the pathetic thing so she could set it on a shelf.

Madison was happy as a clam living at home. She couldn't understand my need to get out. It was more than just dullsville for me; it was nails on a chalkboard, the way my mother's minivan greeted me at the suburban Barrington Metra station each day after work, Mom behind the wheel, always on my case to know how the day had gone.

Did you make any friends today?
she had asked that first day of my new career as a project assistant at an illustrious law firm in the Loop, as if it was the first day of kindergarten and not a job. I got the job based on a little white lie, claiming interest in law school when law school didn't interest me at all.

Did you learn anything new?
my mother asked there, that day, in the front seat of her car.

Nope, Mom. Nothing.

But I did, didn't I? I learned how much the job sucked.

And then my mother and I drove home, where I was forced to listen to the parental figures go on and on about how Madison was
oh so smart
, about how Madison
aced
another exam, about how Madison had already been
accepted
to some smarty-pants college, while I'd picked one based on the simple fact that it was cheap and they'd actually accepted me as opposed to the mass of rejections I received following a poor performance on my SAT.

I had to get out. I was feeling suffocated, smothered. I couldn't breathe.

And that's when it happened. I was riding the Metra home from work when I flipped open to the classifieds and saw the ad in the
Reader
. Esther's ad, a beacon in a dark night sky. I'd looked for apartments before, but my entry-level job barely paid minimum wage, and though I tried cutting corners—
studio
apartments,
garden
apartments, apartments on the
south
side—the simple fact was that I couldn't afford an apartment in Chicago all on my own. And an apartment outside of Chicago was out of the question because then not only would I need an apartment, I'd also need a car, some mode of transportation to drive me to and from the train station rather than mother dearest.

Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale, close to bus and train.

I was sold! I called immediately and we made arrangements to meet.

The day I was to meet Esther for the first time, I mentally prepared myself for a meeting with Jennifer Jason Leigh. Truth be told, Madison had psyched me out with the whole
Single White Female
bit. To make matters worse, I watched the movie before our meeting, watched as Jennifer Jason Leigh, aka Hedy, turned all psycho or whatnot, assuaged only in the fact that, as the one moving
into
Esther's apartment, I was in fact the Jennifer Jason Leigh in our situation, and she the charming Bridget Fonda.

And indeed she was charming.

Esther was running late that day, held up at work by a coworker who'd called in sick. She phoned as I was heading to the apartment, and we made plans to meet instead at a bookshop on Clark, where I soon found out she worked. Just a part-time gig while she finished up a master's degree in occupational therapy, she said. She was a singer, too, the type who performed on occasion at one of the local bars. “Just something to pay the bills,” she said, though in time I would come to learn it was more than that. Esther had a secret craving to be the next Joni Mitchell.

“What's an occupational therapist?” I asked as she led me through the stacks of books to a quieter spot in back and we sat on blood-orange poufs meant for children's story time, apologizing for dragging me down to the bookshop and veering me away from our original plan. It was a Saturday; the shop was full of cosmopolites, browsing the shelves, picking their books. They looked smart, every single one of them, as did Esther, though in a cool, contemporary sort of way. She was doe-eyed and polite, but possessed traces of an inner devil, be it the sterling silver nose stud or the gradient hair. I liked that about Esther right away. Dressed in a cozy cardigan and cargo pant ensemble, Esther was cool.

“We help people learn how to care for themselves. People with disabilities, delays, injuries. The elderly. It's like rehab, self-help and psychiatry all rolled into one.”

Her teeth were aligned successively inside her mouth, a brilliant white. Her eyes were heterochromatic—one brown, one blue—something I'd never before seen. She wore glasses that day, though I learned later they were only for show, a prop for her role as book salesman. She said they made her look smart. But Esther didn't need faux glasses to look smart; she already was.

The day we met, she asked me about my job and whether or not I'd be able to afford my half of the rent. That was Esther's only qualification, that I pay my own way. “I can,” I promised her, showing my latest paycheck as proof. Five-fifty a month I could do. Five-fifty a month for a bedroom of my own in a walk-up apartment on Chicago's north side. She took me there, down the street from the bookshop, just as soon as she finished reading to the tiny tots who pilfered from us the blood-orange poufs. I listened to her as she read aloud, taking on the voice of a bear and a cow and a duck, her voice pacifying and sweet. She was meticulous in the details, from the way she made sure the little ones were attentive and quiet, to the way she turned the pages of the oversize book so all could see. Even I found myself perched on the floor, listening to the tale. She was enchanting.

In the walk-up apartment, Esther showed to me the space that could be my room if I so chose.

She never said what happened to the person who used to live there in the room before me, the room I would soon inhabit, though in the weeks that followed I found vestiges of his or her existence in the compact closet in the large bedroom: an indecipherable name etched into the wall with pencil, a fragment of a photograph abandoned on the vacant floor of a hollow room so that all that remained on the glossy image was a wisp of Esther's shadowy hair.

The scrap of photo I did away with after I moved in, but there was nothing I could do to fix the closet wall. I knew it was Esther's hair in the photograph because, like the heterochromatic eyes, she had hair like I'd never before seen, the way she bleached it from bottom to top to get a gradual fade, dark brown on top, blond at the bottom. The tear line on the picture was telling, too, the barbed white of the photo paper, the image gone—all but Esther.

I didn't toss the photo, but rather handed it to Esther with the words, “I think this is yours,” as I unpacked my belongings and moved in. That was nearly a year ago. She'd snatched it from my hand and threw it away, an act that meant nothing to me at the time.

But now I can't help but wonder if it should have meant something. Though what, I'm not so sure.