Don't You Cry (7 page)

Quinn

I don't have to wait too long to be put to the test again.

As I stand in the kitchen, in my hand the phone rings. Esther's phone. I jump. This time it's not a blocked call, but a local 773 number. The caller has an easygoing voice, upbeat, maybe the same age as me, though it's hard to tell through the phone because of course I can't
see
the woman on the other end of the line. She asks if this is Esther, and this time I assert proudly, “It is.”

It's fun, masquerading around as Esther. I hold Esther in the highest regard. If there was one person in the world I'd like to be, it's Esther. She's beautiful and intelligent and kind. She's dauntless and spunky sometimes, and a good roommate to boot.

But all those thoughts fall quickly by the wayside when the caller on the other end of the line announces, “I was inquiring about your ad in the
Reader
.”

“What ad?” I ask, forgetting for a fleeting moment that I am supposed to be Esther. She's trying to sell some things, I figure, maybe cleaning out the crap in that storage facility. Who needs an old lava lamp, anyway? They're way passé.

But when the woman on the other end of the line declares, “The ad for the roommate,” my mouth drops. I'm all but stunned speechless. “Have you already found someone else?” she asks, and a tremendous amount of time passes before I find the ability to speak.

A thousand thoughts run amuck in my mind, but at the very core of them is one question that comes to me again and again: Why?
Why
did Esther place an ad in the
Reader
,
why
is she looking for a new roommate,
why
does she want to do away with me? I'm hurt. My feelings are hurt like I've been stabbed in the back with Romeo's dagger. I get it that I'm a slob and I pay a measly forty-five percent of the rent rather than the afore-agreed-to fifty, that I don't always have the cash to cover my share of the utilities or that I leave lights on and forget to turn off the sink water.
But still, Esther
, I snap silently in my head, wondering suddenly who is the lousier roommate: Esther or me.
How could you do this to me?
Where did she possibly think I would go if she kicked me out? Back home to suburban America to live with my mother and father and Madison the dweeb? No way. Esther could have pointed out my deficiencies for me; we could have had a conversation about it. She could have given me some warning before deciding to kick me out. Some time to find a new apartment, a new roommate. My heart sinks. I thought Esther was my friend, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe Esther was just my roommate all along.

“It's okay if you did. I mean, it's not a big deal,” says the caller, but I clear my throat and swallow the overwhelming sense of betrayal and say to her, “No. I didn't. I'm so glad you called,” and it's then that I make arrangements to meet the young lady who's about to be my replacement, who's to take over my spot at the kitchen table, my place on the rose-colored sofa, the one who will soon inhabit my room, and become best friends with my best friend while I get tossed like leftover food.

I think of myself, all alone in the big city, without Esther. I can't afford the rent in a city apartment on my own if my life depends on it. Eleven hundred dollars a month this unit costs, which in Chicago is quite the steal. Esther has lived in this apartment for years, the reason it was cheaper than all its other walk-up counterparts in the neighborhood: rent control. If I walked into Mrs. Budny's office today and told her I wanted my own apartment, identical to the one I share with Esther, she'd charge me sixteen hundred bucks a month and I don't have anything in the realm of that kind of money.

I agree to meet with my replacement after work tomorrow at a small coffee shop on Clark. We say our goodbyes and I pull up the
Reader
online, and sure enough, there it is, the ad.
Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale. Call Esther
, and there she leaves her cell phone number beside a photograph of our walk-up from the outside, the autumn leaves tumbling from the trees as if she'd taken that photo yesterday or maybe just the day before.

Why, Esther?
I silently beg.
Why?

MONDAY

Alex

I rise early, well before the sun, and head out into the cold morning air for the long haul to town to retrieve Ingrid's groceries for her as promised. The air is nippy today, making it hard to breathe. It burns my lungs, freezes my hands and ears as I close and lock the door behind myself, shutting a dozing Pops inside. In my hand I carry bills to discard in the mailbox outside. I used last week's paycheck to cover them, the gas bill coming with a Final Notice
that we'd soon be without heat. Its arrival a week ago yesterday prompted a scolding of Pops about how he'd better get his shit together and find a job.

I'm glad to see he took it to heart.

As I make my way to the mailbox, I eyeball that old, abandoned home across the street, searching for potential squatters or other signs of life. It's an ugly sight, it is, one of the few scars on our otherwise tolerable street. There are vacant houses, properties foreclosed on, new homes stymied in the midst of construction, plywood and two-by-fours and other building supplies still taking up residence on the weedy lawns. It's a sign of the times, the housing crisis of our generation that other generations will read about in history textbooks to come. I'm kind of stoked about it in some weird way, knowing these abandoned, beaten-up, unloved homes are making history as we speak.

The people in the neighborhood are mostly blue-collar workers, many commuting from as far as Portage, Indiana, or Hobart, to earn a paycheck and pay their bills. They work mainly in the manufacturing industry, if they're not working retail for some shop in town. Money is harder to come by here than it is for others, and yet we're better off than those in the slummy apartments off Emery Road, the subsidized housing units, low-income apartments paid for in part by the US government.

But regardless of how many scourged homes there are on the block or in town, this is the house everyone always talks about: that school-bus-yellow, minimal traditional home with its aluminum siding and its busted roof, right across the street from mine.

That house wasn't always a blot on the landscape. Though I've never seen it as anything but a blight with my own two eyes, I've heard this from neighbors who stand on their front lawns from time to time, arms crossed, frowning at what it's become over the years. It wasn't always such an eyesore, they tell me.
A damn shame
, they say. There was a time when the house was actually lived in and nice. Neighbors want it demolished, but the bank that owns the property doesn't want to pay for that. That costs money. And so they leave it be. The house is a pockmark now, though it's always been this way, since I was a little thing myself. Like the rest of the world I wish someone would level it to the ground and take it out of its misery.

And then of course there are the stories of the ghost of Genevieve.

Kids (gutsy, stupid or otherwise) have been known to creep to the windows and peer in, spying her wraith through the panes of glass. But it isn't just the kids. No, adults claim they see her, too, a tiny apparition in white drifting from room to room, lost and alone, calling for her mommy.

In middle school, it's a rite of passage, being dared to spend the night inside the haunted house. I did it myself when I was twelve. Sort of. We made it a couple hours, at best. Half the battle was getting out of your own house without your mom or pop taking notice, though my pop was so ripped he didn't know whether I was here or there or anywhere. But the other guys had to lie to their folks, saying they were sleeping somewhere else, or climb out their bedroom windows long after they were supposed to be asleep.

But it was an initiation of sorts, being recruited from the nerd herd to the in-crowd, all by spending the night with a spook.

And so we did. Or tried to at least. A bunch of buddies and I packed bags full of flashlights, lockback knives, binoculars and food, and double dog dared one another to spend the night there, in that yellow house with a ghost. Why? Don't ask me why. We just did.

We had a disposable camera with us, too, to take pictures to show off the next day at school. Proof that we did it. We spent the night with a spook and we survived. Some guy tagged along with night-vision, another with a camcorder. Another with something he claimed was a thermal imager (it wasn't). We climbed in through a busted window—me scratching my shin on a shard of glass—and set up camp in what was one day the living room of a happy family, with sleeping bags, pillows and all. We snapped photos, the guys and I—beside the cobwebbed fireplace, sitting on an old sunken-in sofa that seethed with bugs, crossing the threshold to her room.
Her
room.

Genevieve's room.

From the stories I've heard over the years, Genevieve was a naughty little girl. In the five years before her death, she was caught more than once upsetting bird nests, and pulling the legs one by one off the thorax of ensnared bugs. It's the kind of thing people remember about Genevieve, little Genevieve climbing a tree to jettison robin fledglings to the ground, whereby she scampered down the tree and stepped on them, while mama robin watched on, defenseless, unable to do a thing to save her babies. The kids in the neighborhood at the time, adults now, long gone—though their parents remain—recall the way their children didn't want to play with Genevieve. Genevieve was cruel. Genevieve was mean. She pulled their kids' hair; she called them names. She made them cry and fake stomachaches, saying they didn't want to go to school, because once there Genevieve would punch them in the gut and kick their shins. She had a temper, a nasty temper, or so I've heard, and not just the typical pouting, crying, whining behavior of a usual five-year-old child, but a five-year-old who could've used a straitjacket or, at the very least, some mood stabilizing drugs.

No wonder half the town is certain she came back as a ghost, to haunt them even in death.

The guys and I made it in that old house a few hours at best before figuring out we weren't the only ones there, and we ran. It had nothing at all to do with a ghost. It was the rats that did us in. The damn rats. Roof rats. We didn't make it past 11:00 p.m., when they came out in search of food.

Even these days, all these years later, there are allegations of strange noises at night. A child singing lullabies, a child's cry.

Me? I'm pretty sure it's just the wind.

But others aren't so sure. Some people are superstitious enough not to walk past the house, and so they cross the street to my side instead. Others hold their breath the whole darn way, like passing a cemetery and holding your breath to make sure you don't breathe in the spirit of the dead. They tuck their thumbs inside their fists, too, but I don't know why. I just know that they do. Death superstitions are the norm around here.

If your shadow is headless, you will die.

An owl sighting during the day means death is coming.

A bird crashing into a window also means death is near.

Death comes in threes.

And corpses should always be removed from a home feetfirst. Always.

I don't buy any of it. I'm far too skeptical for that.

Funny thing is, she didn't even die in that house. That's where she lived, sure, where Genevieve lived, but that's not where she died. So how could her spirit be there?

But maybe that's just me being overly pragmatic.

Quinn

The night comes and goes but Esther doesn't come home. The next day I can hardly drag myself out the front door and on to work, for what I want to do most is sit at home and wait for Esther. Forty-eight to seventy-two hours the 311 operator assured me, and Esther has only been gone for twenty-four. Seventy percent of missing people leave of their own free will; she told me that, too. I also know that Esther is on the lookout for a new roommate—one to replace me—and so I connect the dots in my head and easily surmise that Esther's leaving has something to do with me and my laxity. I'm a lousy roommate; I get that. But still, whether or not it
is
my fault, it doesn't make me feel any better. It feels like a kick in the teeth to me, the fact that Esther wants me out.

But I can't sit home for the next two days and wait for Esther to magically appear. I have to work, and hope that if and when she does return, we can talk this out.

Monday morning I'm riding the 22 into the Loop in a short skirt for some ungodly reason. At every single bus stop—at every single intersection—the doors burst open and the nippy, November air rushes in to assault my bare legs. I have panty hose on, don't get me wrong, but sheer hosiery does nothing to fend off the merciless wind in the Windy City. There are pumps in my bag, a pair of gym shoes on my feet: my working-woman image.

If only my mother could see me now! She'd be so proud.

I have headphones on, a tablet on my lap playing music so that—more than anything else—I can drown out the litany of coughs and sneezes and breathing of those around me. So I can pretend that they're not here, though the crooning voice of Sam Smith begging me to stay isn't such a bad way to start the day.

Some dunce has left a window open a crack so that the temperature on the bus can be no more than sixty-two degrees. I pull my coat tightly around me and snap at the itinerant man sitting behind me to stop touching my hair,
please
. This isn't the first time he's been on the bus with me. He's a vagrant, the type of man who spends every last penny he owns to ride the bus. Not because he has anywhere to go, but because he doesn't. He does it to stay warm. He rides as far as the driver will let him, and then he gets off. He begs for more money, and when another two dollars comes his way, he pays his fare and rides again. I kind of feel sorry for the man. Kind of.

But if he touches me again, I'm changing seats.

The Loop comes into view, the buildings rising higher and higher into the sky as we leave Andersonville and pass through Uptown, Wrigleyville, Lake View, Lincoln Park.

And that's when it returns to me, as the 22 bus galumphs down Clark Street, gooseflesh on my skin, some creep to my rear fondling my long golden locks. I'm mad. Esther is trying to replace me.

It's like stubbing your toe or passing a kidney stone. It hurts. Better yet, it's like smashing your fingers in a car door. I want to cry out and scream. There's this hollowness in my heart, this knowledge that I can't quite wrap my head around. I hear that girl on the phone last night—Esther's phone—the credulousness in her cheerful voice as she happily declared,
I was inquiring about your ad in the
Reader
. The ad for the roommate.

Little does she know that in less than a year Esther might give her the boot, too.

I get off the bus and scurry to my office building, a high-rise on Wabash. It's a tall, black building with fifty indistinguishable floors of office upon office. Its once-gorgeous view is now obstructed by the latest and greatest skyscraper monstrosity: ninety-eight floors of steel framework and curtain walls that popped up in the city almost overnight, smack-dab on the opposite side of the street from my place of employment. The lawyers who I work for, the ones with their panoramic office views and offices as big as my parents' home, are peeved about it, about the fact that they no longer overlook Lake Michigan because some business tycoon and his superstructure has stolen their view.

First-world problems.

I take the elevator up to the forty-third floor, smile at the receptionist, who smiles at me. I'm pretty sure she doesn't know my name, but at least she no longer asks to see my ID. I've had this job for an entire three hundred and sixty days. That's a whole lot of Mondays. I don't like the job one bit, a project assistant job that is lower on the totem pole than the janitors even, the men and women who wipe the floor and clean urine off the toilets.

The reason I wanted this job was that it paid. Not much, but it paid. And there wasn't a whole lot I could do with a liberal arts degree from a crappy college. But this I could do.

The first thing I do when I arrive at work is try to find Ben. Ben, who never returned my call last night because he was too busy doing things with his girlfriend, Priya. But I won't let my mind go there; I can't. I don't want to think about Ben and Priya right now, Ben and Priya and my insatiable jealousy. Instead, I focus on the task at hand. I have to find Ben. I have to talk to Ben about Esther.

And so I slip into the stairwell and start to make my ascent to Ben's floor. Our firm, a national law firm with well over four hundred attorneys, occupies eleven floors of office space in the black building. Each floor is essentially the same, with the paralegals and project assistants like me shoved into small cubes in the interior of each floor, forced to dwell among the stacks and files and photocopy machines. Where we reside, there is no such thing as natural lighting, but rather fluorescent troffers, which do nothing for the tone of my skin or the shade of my hair. The lighting makes me look yellow and sickly, so one might think I'm afflicted with a serious case of jaundice, caused by some sort of liver or bile duct disease. Now that's classy.

I work on the forty-third floor. Ben, the forty-seventh. I start climbing the steps one by one, trying hard to ignore the creepiness of the office stairwell. I don't use it all that often, but there are times when a girl doesn't want to be crammed on a small elevator with three or five or even one hotshot attorney, and today is one of those days.

When I get to Ben's cube on the forty-seventh floor, it's empty. His computer is on, and beside his swivel chair is a leather bag and a pair of black running shoes. I know that he's here, somewhere—in the building—and yet he's not here
in his cube. I ask around to see if anyone has seen Ben, trying to mask the angst I feel with a weedy smile. “He was here,”
some blonde paralegal tells me as she scampers by with a box in hand, her sling-back heels clickety-clacking down the wooden floors, “but now he's not.”
Obviously.

I find a piece of scrap paper and jot down a quick note in the best handwriting I can muster, though my hands shake for about a million reasons, or maybe a million and one.
We need to talk. ASAP
,
I write, and leave the note on the plastic keyboard before returning to my own cube, disgruntled.

This morning I'm given the all-important task of Bates labeling documents. It sounds important, it really does. It has a name even, Bates labeling, like the fact that those little dots over a lower case
i
or
j
have a name—a
tittle
it's called, a simple fact I discovered while searching the internet and charging my time to one of the firm's more opulent clients—or when your second toe is bigger than your big toe, it's called a Morton's toe. Important things worthy of names. Like Bates labels. Matters of life or death.

But no. What I'm doing is placing hundreds of thousands of numbered stickers on a looming document production before being given the task of photocopying them three or five or ten times. There are boxes of documents, and worse yet, they're not even full of scandalous details like the divorce lawyers get, but rather
financial
documents. Because I get to work for transactional lawyers, boring men who get their kicks staring at financial documents and talking about money all the livelong day while paying me pennies above minimum wage.

As I settle into my task of Bates labeling, my movements become hurried and repetitive, my mind far removed from the stacks of financial documents that lay before me. I'm at work, but I certainly can't focus on work. All I can think about is Esther. Where is Esther? I can't focus on a single thing, not Bates labeling the piles of documents before me, nor skimming through a mountain of correspondence and pleadings, marking over and over again our client's name with a red Post-it flag, until all the words start to blur before my eyes. I replay our last conversation in my mind. Did I miss something hidden there in the tone of her voice or her weary smile? She was sick; she didn't feel well.
I'd be a killjoy, Quinn. Go without me. You'll have more fun.

But now I have to wonder: Was this a test? Was Esther putting me to the test? Seeing what kind of roommate I really was, and whether or not I'd put her needs before my own.

If that's the case, then I guess I failed. I went out without her; I had fun. I didn't even think to stop by Esther's room when I got home to see how she was feeling and if she was okay. The thought never even crossed my mind. I didn't offer to bring her a blanket or warm up a bowl of soup. Another roommate, a better roommate, would have made soup. Another roommate would have said, “No way,” to Esther's insistence that I go. “No way, Esther. I'll have more fun here with you.”

But that's not what I said. I said okay, and left in a hurry out through the front door. I didn't think twice about my decision not to stay.

“Damn,” I say out loud now as a sheet of paper slices the fragile skin of my index finger, and red blood swells to the surface, leaving its mark on a statement of cash flow. “Damn, damn, damn,” I repeat, knowing my escalating frustration is directed far more at Esther than this insignificant amount of blood loss. My finger hurts and yet my heart hurts even more.

Esther is trying to replace me.

My mind considers for one split second a world without Esther, and it makes me feel sad.

“Bad day?” a voice asks then, and I peer up from my paper cut to see Ben in the doorway, standing arms akimbo (that, too, is a thing also discovered on a random internet search, meaning: standing with hands on hips), as he spies the driblets of blood on my hand and says to me, “Here, let me help.”

Ben wears a pair of slim cotton chinos, taupe, and a piqué polo shirt the color of peacock feathers. He's impeccably dressed and looks amazing, though chances are he rode his bike to work as he so often does, a Schwinn hybrid that he locks to the galvanized steel bike rack outside the building. He's got a runner's build, lank but muscular, always adorned in tight-fitting clothes—tailored tops and skinny bottoms—so you can see each and every one of the gluteal and abdominal muscles. Or so I imagine you can see them.

It's no secret I have a crush on Ben. I'm pretty sure everyone in the world knows but him.

Ben grabs a tissue from a box and presses it firmly to my hand. His hands are warm, his movements decisive. He holds my hand in his, inches above my heart. He smiles as he tugs on my arm and raises it higher. “It's supposed to help slow the bleeding,” he says, and for the first time in a while I smile, too, since we both know good and well no one ever bled out from a paper cut. The only thing it will do is leave a mess on these stupid financial documents—nothing a little Wite-Out can't fix—but I'll be just fine.

“Sorry I missed your call last night,” he says to me, then, “What's up?” He carries with him my note:
We need to talk. ASAP.

I have this urge to unload on Ben right here and right now, to tell him everything: Esther, the fire escape, the bizarre letter to
My Dearest
and more. There's so much to tell Ben, but I don't. Not yet, anyway, not here. I don't want to talk here. Gossip in this place spreads like wildfire, and the last thing I need is the nosy PA down the hall telling the rest of the firm about what a shoddy roommate I am or how Esther has renounced me.

Ben, Esther and I are like the three stooges, the three musketeers. It was me who brought us together. I knew Ben from work—we started working at the firm on the same day, and together sat through eight painful hours of filling out mounds of human resource forms, watching mindless videos, surviving orientation. I was bored beyond belief when two hours in Ben turned to me in our swivel chairs at some fancy-schmancy conference room table and parodied the HR lady for what was clearly a surfeit of Botox injections. Her face was frozen stiff; she couldn't smile.

I laughed so hard I was pretty sure coffee shot up my nose.

We've been friends ever since, sharing lunch together almost every day, an extravagance of coffee breaks, rumors about the firm's attorneys.

And then came the day when I moved in with Esther, about two weeks before Ben and my twosome became a threesome. Esther suggested we host a party to celebrate my arrival. She put up decorations; she made hors d'oeuvres galore. Of course she did; she's Esther. That's the kind of thing Esther does. She invited a whole slew of people she knew: people from the bookstore, from grad school, from the building and around the neighborhood; Cole, the physical therapist from the first floor; Noah and Patty from down the street.

I invited Ben.

Everyone else came and went, but by the end of the night it was just me and Esther and Ben, rattling on and on about nothing until morning came and Priya called him home, interrupting our fun. He went, grudgingly, and then the next weekend when Priya was too busy studying for a midterm exam to hang out with Ben, he came back.

You like him, don't you?
Esther had asked knowingly once Ben was gone.

It's that apparent?
I'd asked of her, and then, stating the obvious,
It's not like it matters, anyway. He has a girlfriend
,
as she and I sat on the sofa side by side, staring at a blackened TV screen.