Praise for Mary Kubica

‘Fans of Gone Girl will embrace this’ – Lisa Gardner

‘Grabs you from the moment it starts’

– Daily Mail

‘Gets right under your skin and leaves its mark.

A tremendous read’

– The Sun

‘Pulse pounding’

– Heather Gudenkauf

‘Sensational’

– Metro

‘Fantastic … I would recommend it to every crime fiction reader out there’

– Rebeccabradleycrime.com

‘Memorable and riveting’

– Lovereading.co.uk

‘Stunning. Kubica is an author to watch’

– We Love This Book

‘A complex tale of deceit, jealousy, fear and love’

– Crimethrillergirl.com

Don’t You Cry
Mary Kubica

Copyright

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2016

Copyright © Mary Kubica 2016

Mary Kubica asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9781474048743

Version: 2018-07-20

MARY KUBICA holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in History and American Literature. She lives outside of Chicago with her husband and two children and enjoys photography, gardening and caring for the animals at a local shelter. Don’t You Cry is her third novel. Visit her website www.MaryKubica.com

For Pete

Contents

Cover

Praise for Mary Kubica

Title Page

Copyright

About the Author

Dedication

SUNDAY

Quinn

Alex

Alex

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MONDAY

Alex

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TUESDAY

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WEDNESDAY

Alex

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THURSDAY

Alex

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Extract

Endpage

About the Publisher

SUNDAY

Quinn

In hindsight, I should have known right away that something wasn’t quite right. The jarring noise in the middle of the night, the open window, the empty bed. Later, I blamed a whole slew of things for my nonchalance, everything from a headache to fatigue, down to arrant stupidity.

But still.

I should have known right away that something wasn’t right.

* * *

It’s the alarm clock that wakes me. Esther’s alarm clock hollering from two doors down.

“Shut it off,” I grumble, dropping the pillow to my head. I roll over onto my stomach and swim beneath a second pillow to smother the sound, throwing the covers up over my head, too.

No such luck. I still hear it.

“Dammit, Esther,” I snap as I kick the covers to the end of the bed and rise. Beside me there are rustles of complaint, blind eyes reaching out to reclaim the blanket, an aggravated sigh. Already the taste of last night’s alcohol creeps up my insides, something called a cranberry smash, and a bourbon sour, and a Tokyo iced tea. The room whirls around me like a Hula-Hoop, and I have this sudden memory of twirling around a dirty dance floor with some guy named Aaron or Darren, or Landon or Brandon. The same guy that asked to split a cab with me on the way home, the one that’s still lying on my bed when I nudge him and tell him he has to go, yanking the blanket from his hands. “My roommate,” I say, poking him in the ribs, “is awake. You have to go.”

“You have a roommate?” he asks, sitting up in bed, yet beset by sleep. He rubs at his eyes and it’s then that I see it in the glimmer of a nearby streetlight that glares through the window and across the rumpled bed: he’s twice my age. Hair that looked brown in the hazy burn of bar lights—and under the influence of a healthy dose of alcohol—is now a pewter-gray. Dimples are not dimples at all, but rather laugh lines. Wrinkles.

“Dammit, Esther,” I say again under my breath, knowing that before long, old Mrs. Budny from downstairs will be pounding the ceiling with the hard end of her sponge mop to silence the rumpus.

“You have to go,” I say to him again, and he does.

I follow the trail of noise into Esther’s room. The alarm clock, a droning noise like a cicada’s song. I mutter under my breath as I go, one hand dragging along the wall as I make my way down the darkened halls. The sun won’t rise for another hour. It’s not yet 6:00 a.m. Esther’s alarm screams at her like it does every Sunday morning. Time to get ready for church. Esther, with her silvery, soothing voice, has been singing in the church choir every Sunday morning at the Catholic church on Catalpa for as long as I can remember. Saint Esther, I call her.

When I enter Esther’s bedroom, the first thing I notice is the cold. Drafts of frosty November air sail in from the window. A stash of paper on her desk—held secure by a heavy college textbook: Introduction to Occupational Therapy—blows in the breeze, making a raucous noise. Frost covers the insides of the window, condensation running in streams down the panes of glass. The window is pushed up all the way. The fiberglass screen is removed, set to the floor with cause.

I lean out the window to see if Esther is there on the fire escape, but outside the world—on our little residential block of Chicago—is quiet and dark. Parked cars line the street, caked in the last batch of fallen leaves from nearby trees. Frost covers the cars and the yellowing grass, which fades fast; soon it will die. Plumes of smoke escape from roof vents on nearby homes, drifting into the morning sky. The whole of Farragut Avenue is asleep, except for me.

The fire escape is empty; Esther is not there.

I turn away from the window and see Esther’s covers lying on the floor, a bright orange duvet with an aqua throw. “Esther?” I say as I make my way across the boxy bedroom, hardly big enough for Esther’s double bed. I trip over a stash of clothes tossed to the floor, my feet getting tangled in a pair of jeans. “Rise and shine,” I say as I smack my hand against the alarm clock to shut it up. Instead, I wind up turning the radio on, and a cacophony of noise fills the room, morning talk against the drone of the alarm. “Dammit,” I swear, and then, losing patience, “Esther!”

I see it then as my eyes adjust to the darkness of the room: Saint Esther is not in her bed.

I finally manage to shut off the alarm clock and then turn on the light, grimacing as the bright light makes my head ache, the aftereffects of an overindulgent night. I do a double take to make sure I haven’t somehow or other managed to miss Esther, checking under the heap of blankets lying on the floor. Ridiculous, I know, even as I’m doing it, but I do it nonetheless. I check in her closet; I check the single bathroom, my eyes scanning past the prolific collection of overpriced cosmetics we share, tossed at random on the vanity.

But Esther is nowhere.

Smart decisions aren’t really my forte. They’re Esther’s. And so maybe that’s why I don’t call the cops right away, because Esther isn’t here to tell me to do it. In all honesty, though, my first thought isn’t that something happened to Esther. It isn’t my second, third or fourth thought, either, and so I let the hangover get the best of me, close the window and go back to bed.

When I wake for the second time, it’s after ten. The sun is up, and all along Farragut Avenue people scuttle to and from the coffee and bagel shops for breakfast, or lunch, or whatever it is that people eat and drink at 10:00 a.m. They’re blanketed in puffer jackets and wool trench coats, hands forced into pockets, hats on head. It doesn’t take a brainiac to know that it’s cold.

I, however, sit on the small apartment sofa—the color of rose petals—in the living room, waiting for Saint Esther to arrive with a hazelnut coffee and a bagel. Because that’s what she does every Sunday after singing in the church choir. She totes home a coffee and a bagel for me and we sit at the small kitchen table and eat, talking about everything from the children who cried their way through mass, to the choir director’s lost sheet music, to whatever vapid thing I’d done the night before: drinking too much, bringing home some guy I barely knew, some faceless man who Esther never sees but only hears through the paper-thin walls of our apartment.

Last night I went out, but Esther didn’t go with me. She had plans to stay home and rest. She was nursing a cold, she said, but now that I think of it, I saw no visible symptoms of illness—no coughing, no sneezing, no watery eyes. She was on the sofa, buried beneath the blanket in her comfy, cotton pajamas. Come with me, I’d begged of her. There was a new bar open on Balmoral that we’d been dying to go to, one of those chic, low-lit lounge types that only served martinis.

Come with me, I begged, but she said no.

I’d be a killjoy, Quinn, she said instead. Go without me. You’ll have more fun.

Want me to stay home with you? I asked, but it was a halfhearted suggestion. We’ll order takeout, I said, but I didn’t want to order takeout. I was in a new baby-doll dress and heels, my hair was done, my makeup was on. I’d gone so far as to shave my legs for the night; there was no way I was staying home. But at least I offered.

Esther said no, go without her and have fun.

And that’s just what I did. I went out without her and I had fun. But I didn’t go to that martini bar. No, I saved that for Esther and me to do together. Instead, I wound up at some shoddy karaoke bar, drinking too much and going home with a stranger.

When I came home for the night Esther was in bed, with her door closed. Or so I thought at the time.

But now I can’t help but wonder as I sit on the sofa, considering this morning’s turn of events: What in the world would make Esther disappear out the fire escape window?

I think and I think, but my thoughts only land on one thing: an image of Romeo and Juliet, the famous balcony scene, whereby Juliet professes her love for Romeo from the balcony of her home (which is more or less the only thing I remember from my high school education, that and the fact that a pen barrel makes the best artillery for shooting spitballs).

Is that what sent Esther clambering out the window in the middle of the night: a guy?

Of course at the end of that tale, Romeo poisons himself and Juliet stabs herself with a dagger. I read the book. Better yet, I saw the movie, the 1990s adaptation with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio. I know how it ends, with Romeo drinking his poison and Juliet shooting herself in the head with his gun. I think to myself: I just hope Esther’s story has a better ending than that of Romeo and Juliet.

For now there’s nothing to do but wait, and so I sit on the small rose-colored sofa, staring at the empty kitchen table, waiting for Esther to arrive home, regardless of whether she spent the night in her bed or crawled out the third-floor window of our walk-up instead. That doesn’t matter. I still wait in my pajamas—a waffle henley and flannel boxer shorts, a pair of woolly slipper socks prettifying my feet—for my coffee and bagel to arrive. But today they’re a no-show and I blame Esther for it, for the fact that this day I’ll go without breakfast and caffeine.

* * *

By the time noon rolls around, I do what any self-respecting adult might do: I order Jimmy John’s. It takes a good forty-five minutes for my Turkey Tom to arrive, during which time I convince myself that my stomach has begun to digest itself. It’s been a solid fourteen hours since I’ve had a thing to eat, and what with the surplus of alcohol, I’m quite certain I’ve got the whole stomach bloating thing going on like those starving kids you see on TV.

I have no energy. Death is imminent. I may die.

And then the buzzer beeps from the first floor and I rise quickly to my feet. Delivery! I greet the Jimmy John’s guy at the door, handing him his tip, a few measly dollars I manage to find in an envelope Esther stuck in a kitchen drawer with the description Rent.

I eat my lunch hunched over an industrial iron coffee table, and then do what any self-respecting human might do when her roomie has gone AWOL. I snoop. I let myself into Esther’s room without a hint of remorse, without a whisper of guilt.

Esther’s room is the smaller of the two, about the same size as a large refrigerator box. Her double bed spans the room, popcorn wall to popcorn wall, leaving hardly anywhere to walk. That’s what eleven hundred dollars a month will buy you in Chicago: popcorn walls and a refrigerator box.

I slip past the foot of the bed, tripping over the pile of bedding that’s still left on the scratched wooden floors, and peer outside at the fire escape, a collection of ladders and platforms in steel gratings that adheres to Esther’s window. We joked about it when I moved in years ago, how she got the smaller room, but by virtue of the conjoined fire escape to her window, she’d be the one to survive a blaze should the entire building one day go up in flames. I was okay with that. Still am, really, because not only do I have a bed and a desk and a dresser in my room, I have a papasan chair. And the building has never once caught on fire.

Once again, I find myself wondering what in the holy hell would make Esther climb out her fire escape in the middle of the night. What’s wrong with the front door? It’s not as if I’m worried because, really, I’m not. Esther’s been on that fire escape before. We used to sit out there all the time, staring at the moon and the stars, sipping mixed drinks, as if it was a balcony, our feet dangling over a repugnant Chicago alleyway. It was sort of our thing, spreading out along the uncomfortable steel gratings of the dingy black fire escape, sharing our secrets and dreams, feeling the lattice grilles of the unforgiving metal dig into our skin until our backsides fell asleep.

But even if she was there last night, Esther certainly isn’t on the fire escape now.

Where could she be?

I peer inside her closet. Her favorite boots are gone, as if she put on her shoes, opened the window and climbed outside with intent.

Yes, I tell myself. That’s exactly what she did, an assumption that reassures me that Esther is just fine. She’s fine, I tell myself.

But still. Why?

I stare out the window at the quiet afternoon. The morning’s coffee blitz has given way to a caffeine downer; there’s not a soul in sight. I imagine half of Chicagoland perched before the TV, watching the Bears claim another stunning defeat.

And then I turn away from the fire escape and begin my search of Esther’s bedroom. What I find is an unfed fish. A heaping pile of dirty laundry spilling out of a plastic hamper in the closet. Skinny jeans. Leggings. Jeggings. Bras and granny underwear. A stack of white camisoles, folded and set beside the hamper with care. A bottle of ibuprofen. A bottle of water. Grad school textbooks piled sky-high beside her ready-to-assemble IKEA desk, in addition to the one that lies on top of it, holding random papers in place. I set my hand on a desk drawer handle, but I don’t look inside. That would be rude, somehow, more rude than riffling through the items left on top of the desk: her laptop, her iPod, her headphones and more.

Thumbtacked to the wall I find a photograph of Esther and me, taken last year. It was Christmas and together we stood before our artificial Fraser fir, snapping a selfie. I smile at the memory, remembering how Esther and I trekked together through mounds of snow to collect that tree. In the picture, Esther and I are pressed together, the boughs of the evergreen prodding our heads, the tinsel getting stuck to our clothing. We’re laughing, me with a complacent smirk, and Esther with her gregarious smile. The tree is Esther’s, one she keeps at a storage facility down the street, a ten-by-five box where, for sixty bucks a month, she keeps old guitars, a lute and whatever else she can’t fit into her pint-size bedroom. Her bike. And, of course, the tree.

We’d gone to that facility together last December, on a mission to find that Christmas tree. We trudged through embankments of newly fallen snow, our feet getting stuck in it like quicksand. It was snowing still, the kind of snowflakes that poured down from the sky like big, fat, fluffy cotton balls. The cars that lined the city streets were buried deep; they’d have to be dug out or wait for a forty-degree thaw. Half the city was shut down thanks to the blizzard, and so the streets were a rare quiet as Esther and I slogged along, singing Christmas carols at the tops of our lungs because there was hardly anyone around to hear. Only snowplows braved the city streets that day, and even they skidded along in a zigzag line. Work had been canceled, for Esther, for me.

And so we plodded to the storage facility to hunt down that small plastic tree to haul home for the holiday season, stopping in the concrete corridor to do a giddy dance for the security camera and plunging ourselves into hysterics as we did. We imagined the employee—a creepy, quiet introvert—sitting at the front desk, watching as we danced an Irish jig on screen. We laughed and laughed, and then, when we finally stopped laughing, Esther used her padlock key to let us inside and we began to search unit 203, me prattling on and on about the irony of that number, seeing as my own parents lived at 203 David Drive. Fate, said Esther, but I said it was more like a stupid coincidence.

Seeing as the tree was disassembled and stuffed in a box, it was hard to find. There were a lot of boxes in that storage facility. A lot of boxes. And I inadvertently stumbled upon the wrong one apparently, because when I lifted the lid of a box and exposed a mound of photographs of some happy little family sitting beside a squat home, lifting one up and asking of Esther, Who’s this? she snatched it quickly from my hand and said point-blank, No one. I didn’t really have a chance to see the picture, but still, it didn’t look like no one to me. But I didn’t push the issue. Esther didn’t like to talk about her family. That I knew. While I groaned and griped about mine all the time, Esther kept her feelings on the inside.

She tossed the picture back in the box and replaced the lid.

We found that tree and lugged it home together, but not before first stopping by our favorite diner where we sat nearly alone in the vacant place, eating pancakes and sipping coffee in the middle of the day. We watched the snow fall. We laughed at people trying to drag themselves through it, or excavate their cars from pyramids of snow. Those who were fortunate enough to dig themselves out called dibs on their parking spots. They filled them with random things—a bucket, a chair—so no one else would park there. Parking spots were like gold around here, especially in winter. That day, Esther and I sat in the window of the diner and watched this, too—we watched our neighbors lug chairs from their homes to stake a claim in the scooped-out parking spots, ones which would soon fill again with snow—feeling grateful all the time for public transportation.

And then Esther and I carried that tree home where we spent the night prettifying it with lights and ornaments galore, and when we were done, Esther sat crisscross-applesauce on the rose-colored sofa and strummed her guitar while I hummed along: “Silent Night,” “Jingle Bells.” That was last year, the year she bought for me a pair of woolly slipper socks to keep my feet warm because in our apartment I was cold twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I could hardly ever get warm. It was a thoughtful gift, an attentive gift, the kind that proved she’d been listening to me as I complained time and again about my cold feet. I look down at my feet and there they are: the woolly slipper socks.

But where is Esther?

I continue my search, for what I don’t know, but I find stray pens and mechanical pencils. A stuffed animal from her childhood days, ratty and worn, hides on the shelf of a piddling closet whose doors no longer run on the track. Boxes of shoes line the closet floor. I peer inside, finding every last one of the pairs to be sensible and boring: flats, loafers, sneakers.

Absolutely nothing with heels.

Absolutely nothing in a color other than black or white or brown.

And a note.

A note tucked there on top of the IKEA desk, in the stash of paper beneath the occupational therapy textbook, among a cell phone bill and a homework assignment.

A note, unsent and folded in thirds as if she was on the verge of sticking it in an envelope and placing it in the mail, but then got sidetracked.

I put the cap back on the water; I pick up the pens. How was it that I never realized Esther was such a slob? I muse over the thought: What else don’t I know about my roomie?

And then I read the note because, of course, how could I not read the note? It’s a note, which is all sorts of stalker-ish. It’s typed—which is such an anal-retentive Saint Esther thing to do—and signed All my love, with an E and a V. All my love, EV. Esther Vaughan.

And that’s when it hits me: maybe Saint Esther isn’t such a saint, after all.

Alex

One thing should be clear: I don’t believe in ghosts.

There are logical explanations for everything: something as simple as a loose lightbulb. A faulty switch. A problem with the wiring.

I stand in the kitchen, swallowing the last of a Mountain Dew, one shoe on and one shoe off, stepping into the second of the black sneakers, when I see a spasm of light from across the street. On. Off. On. Off. Like an involuntary muscle contraction. A charley horse. A twitch, a tic.

On. Off.

And then it’s done and I’m not even sure if it happened anymore or if it was just my imagination playing tricks on me.

Pops is on the sofa when I go, his arms and legs spread out in all directions. There’s an open bottle of Canadian whiskey on the coffee table—Gibson’s Finest—the cap lost somewhere in the cushions of the sofa, or clutched in the palm of a clammy hand probably. He’s snoring, his chest rattling like an eastern diamondback. His mouth is open, head slung over the arm of the sofa so that when he finally does wake up—hungover, no doubt—he’s sure to have a kink in his neck. The stench of morning breath fills the room, exuding like car exhaust from the open mouth—nitrogen, carbon monoxide and sulfur oxides flowing into the air, making it black. Not really, but that’s the way I picture it, anyway—black—as I hold a hand to my nose so I don’t have to smell it.

Pops wears his shoes still, a pair of dark brown leather boots, the left one untied, frayed laces trailing down the side of the sofa. He wears his coat, a zippered nylon thing the color of spruce trees. The stench of old-school cologne imparts to me the details of his night, another pathetic night that would have gone scores better had he thought to remove his ring. The man has more hair than a man his age should have, cut short, and yet bushy on the tops and sides, a russet color to tag along with the ruddy skin. Other men his age are going bald, thinning hair or no hair at all. They’re getting fat, too. But not Pops. He’s a good-looking guy.

But still, even in sleep, I see defeat. He’s a defeatist, a calamity much worse for forty-five-year-old men than love handles and receding hairlines.

He’s also a drunk.

The TV is on from last night, now playing early-morning cartoons. I flip it off and head out the door, staring at the dumped home across the street where I saw the light coming just a few minutes ago. On, off. It’s a minimal traditional home, school-bus yellow, a concrete slab in place of a porch, aluminum siding, a busted roof.

No one lives in that house. No one wants to live there any more than they want to have a root canal or an appendectomy. Many winters ago, a water pipe froze and burst—or so we heard—filling the inside with water. Some of the windows are boarded up with plywood, which some of the wannabe gangs defaced. Weeds choke the yard, asphyxiating the lawn. A rain gutter hangs loosely from the fascia, its downspout now lying defunct on the lawn. Soon it will be covered with snow.

It isn’t the only house on the street that’s been abandoned, but it is the one everyone always talks about. The economy and the housing market are to blame for the other rotten, forsaken homes, the blight that abraded the rest of our homes’ value and made a once idyllic nabe now ugly.

But not this one. This one has its own story to tell.

I ram my hands into the pockets of a gray jacket and press on.

The lake this morning is angry. Waves pound the shores of the beach, sloshing water across the sand. Cold water. It can’t be more than thirty-five degrees. Warm enough that it hasn’t thought to freeze, not yet, anyway—not like last winter when the lighthouse was plastered with ice, Lake Michigan’s swell frozen midair, clinging to the edges of the wooden pier. But that was last winter. Now it’s fall. There’s still plenty of time for the lake to freeze.

I walk a body length or two away from the lake so my shoes don’t get wet. But still, they get wet. The water sprays sideways from the lake, the surf a solid four-or five-feet high. If it were summer—tourist season—the beach would be closed down, dangerous swimming conditions and rip currents to blame.

But it’s not summer. For now, the tourists are gone.

The town is quiet, some of the shops closed until spring. The sky is dark. Sunrise comes late and sunset early these days. I peer upward. There are no stars; there is no moon. They’re hidden beneath a mass of gray clouds.

The seagulls are loud. They circle overhead, visible only in the swiveling glow from the lighthouse’s lantern room. The wind whips through the air, upsetting the lake, making it hard for the gulls to fly. Not in a straight line, anyway. They float sideways. They flap their wings tenaciously and yet hover in place, going absolutely nowhere like me.

I pull my hood up over my head to keep the sand out of my hair and eyes.

As I crisscross the park, heading away from the lake, I pass the old antique carousel. I stare into the inanimate eyes of a horse, a giraffe, a zebra. A sea serpent chariot where a half dozen years ago I had my first kiss. Leigh Forney, now a freshman at the University of Michigan, studying biophysics or molecular something-or-other, or so I heard. Leigh isn’t the only one who is gone. Nick Bauer and Adam Gott are gone, too, Nick to Cal Tech and Adam to Wayne State, playing point guard for the basketball team. And then there’s Percival Allard, aka Percy, off to some Ivy League school in New Hampshire.

Everyone is gone. Everyone but me.

“You’re late,” Priddy says, the sound of a bell overhead tattling on my overdue arrival. She stands at the register, counting dollar bills into the drawer. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen... She doesn’t look up as I come in. Her hair is down, tight curls of silver rolling over the shoulders of a starched no-nonsense blouse. She’s the only one in the room who’s allowed to have hair that is let down. The waitresses who beetle around in their black-and-white uniforms, filling salt and pepper shakers, bowls of creamer, all have theirs tied back in ponytails or cornrows or braids. But not Mrs. Priddy.

I tried to call her Bronwyn once. That is, after all, her name. It says so right there on her nametag. Bronwyn Priddy. It didn’t go so well.

“Traffic,” I say, and she sniggers. On her ring finger is a wedding band, given to her by her late husband, Mr. Priddy. There’s speculation that her incessant nagging was the cause of his death. Whether or not it’s true, I can only assume. She has a mole on her face, right there in the sallow folds of skin between the mouth and the nose, a raised mole, dark brown and perfectly round, which always sports a single gray hair. It’s the mole that makes the rest of us certain Priddy is a witch. That and her maliciousness. There’s rumors that she keeps her broom in a locked storage closet off the kitchen of the café. Her broom and her cauldron, and whatever other Wiccan things she needs: a bat, a cat, a crow. It’s all there, tucked away behind a locked metal door, though the rest of us are sure we hear them from time to time: a cat’s meow, the crow’s caw. The flapping wings of the bat.

“At this time of day?” Priddy asks about the traffic. But on her face, there’s a smile there somewhere, under the peach fuzz that seriously needs to be waxed. She compensates for it somehow, for the peach fuzz, by drawing eyebrows on—dark brown on hair that is meant to be gray—to take the attention off her ’stache. Priddy pauses a moment in her counting to raise her eyes up off the dollar bills, as I stand there in the entryway stripping off my sandy jacket, and she says to me, “Those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves, you know, Alex. Get to work.”

I think she secretly likes me.

* * *

The morning comes and goes as they always do. Every day is a rehashing of the day before. The same customers, the same conversations, the only difference is a change of clothes. It goes without saying that Mr. Parker, who walks his two dogs at daybreak—a border collie and a Bernese mountain dog—will be the first to arrive. That he’ll tie the dogs up to a streetlamp outside and ramble inside, the soles of his shoes leaving leaf clippings and muddy footprints before the display case, which I’ll later be called upon to wash away. That he’ll order coffee, black, to go, and then let Priddy talk him into some kind of pastry, which erroneously claims to be homemade, which he’ll say no to twice before he says okay, sniffing the air for the faint scent of yeast and butter that isn’t even there.

It goes without saying that at least one waitress will spill a tray full of food. That nearly all of them will gripe about the inadequacy of the tips. That on the weekend, the morning customers will loiter around, drinking endless cups of coffee and shooting the shit until breakfast blends into lunch and they finally leave. But during the week, the only customers hanging around after 9:00 a.m. are retirees, or the school district’s bus drivers who double-park their Blue Birds in the back lot and spend the morning kvetching about the disrespectful nature of those in their care, namely all children between the ages of five and eighteen.

There are no unknowns this time of year. Every day is the same, unlike in the summer months when random tourists appear. Then it’s a crapshoot. We run out of bacon. Some egghead wants to know what’s really in the chocolate croissants, leaving Priddy to send one of us to drag the box out of the trash in back and see. Vacationers snap photos of the café name in the front window; they take pictures with the waitresses as if this is some kind of tourist attraction, a hot-spot destination, spouting on and on about how some Michigan travel guide claims ours is the best coffee in town. They ask if they can buy the cheap mugs that bear our name in an old-style font, and Priddy will up the price from the bulk fee she pays—a dollar fifty apiece—to $9.99. A rip-off.

But none of this happens in the off-season when every single day is a rehashing of the day before, the same of which can be said for today. And tomorrow. And yesterday. At least that’s the way the day sets out to be as Mr. Parker arrives with his two dogs and orders a coffee, black, to go, and Priddy asks him if he’d care for a croissant, which he says no to twice before he says okay.

But then at the end of the morning something happens, something abnormal, making this day different than all the days before.

My Dearest,

It’s one of the last memories I have of you, your arms clinging to her neckline, the gentle curve of her breast pressing into your skin through the thin cotton of a wispy white blouse. She was beautiful to say the least, and yet it was you I couldn’t take my eyes off of—the shimmer of your skin and the radiance of your eyes, the gradual curve of your lips as she traced over them with the pad of a forefinger and then placed her own to yours. A kiss.

It was through the window that I saw you. I stood there, in the middle of the street, not hiding in the shadows or behind trees. Smack-dab in the middle of the street, impervious to the flow of traffic. I’m surprised she didn’t see me, that she didn’t hear the blare of a car horn suggestion that I move. Recommending it. But I didn’t move. I couldn’t be bothered. I was too busy watching the two of you gathered together in a warm embrace. Too intrigued and too angry.

Maybe you did. Maybe you did see me, but only pretended not to see or hear.

It was nighttime, just after dusk as I pressed my face now to the glass to see inside. The curtains were open, every single light in the house on as if you wanted me to see. As if you were gloating, rubbing it in, exulting in your victory. Or maybe that was something she came up with all on her own: leaving the lights on so that I could see. It was, after all, her victory. Like a spotlight illuminating dancers onstage, the way you laughed, the way she smiled, no one noticing my absence because I’d already been replaced as if somehow I’d never even been there in the first place.

Except that you weren’t onstage at all, but rather in the living room of a home I was meant to share with you.

I have to know: Did you see me? Were you trying to make me mad?

All my love,

EV

Alex

Her hair is dark brown. Sort of. A dark brown that lightens steadily so that by the time your eyes reach the end of it, it’s nearly gone blond. Ombré. It’s got a subtle wave to it, an understated wave, so you’re not really sure if it’s a wave at all or if it’s just windblown, the hair that sits below the shoulders. Brown hair to accompany the brown eyes, which—like the hair—seem to change colors the longer I stare. She arrives alone, holding the door for a couple of old fogeys who follow on the heels of her overpriced Uggs. She steps back and waits while they’re seated, though it was clearly she who arrived first. She stands there in the entranceway, somehow looking sure and not so sure all at the same time. Her stance is that of aplomb: upright posture, nothing fidgety or twitchy, simply waiting her turn.

But her eyes are aimless.

I’ve never seen her around here before, but for years now I’ve been imagining she would come.

When it’s her turn, she’s seated at a table beside the window so she can watch the same predictable customers who come and go and come and go, though it goes without saying that they’re anything but predictable to her. I watch as she slips from a black-and-white checkered pea coat. There’s a marled black beanie on her head. She removes the hat and drops it on an empty brown banquette chair beside her canvas bag. Then she peels a knitted scarf from around her neck and drops that, too, on the chair. She’s petite, though not like those überskinny models you see on the fashion magazines in the grocery store lines. No, not like that. She’s not pin thin, but her build is slight. More short than tall, more skinny than not skinny. But still, not short and not skinny, either. Just average or normal, I guess, but she’s really not any of those things, either.

Beneath the pea coat and the beanie and the scarf, there’s a pair of jeans with the Uggs. And a hoodie. Blue. With pockets.

Outside, day has broken. It’s another sunless day. There are leaves on the sidewalk, brittle, crumbly leaves; what remain on the trees will lose their hold by the end of the afternoon, if the westerly wind has any say in it. It whips around the corners of the redbrick buildings, sneaking under a kaleidoscope of awnings where it lies in wait for the perfect opportunity to snatch someone’s hat or steal scraps of paper from their glove-laden hands.

There’s no threat of rain. Not yet, anyway. But the cold and the wind will keep plenty of people inside, forestalling the promise of winter.

She orders a coffee. She sits by the window, sipping out of the discount ceramic coffee mug, staring out the window at the view: the brick buildings, the colorful awnings, the fallen leaves. You can’t see Lake Michigan from here. But people like to sit at the window, anyway, and imagine. It’s there somewhere, the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. Harbor Country, we’re called, a string of small beachfront towns just seventy-some miles outside of Chicago, seventy-some miles that are somehow equivalent to three states and another world away. That’s where most of our clientele comes from, anyway. Chicago. Sometimes Detroit or Cleveland or Indianapolis. But most often Chicago. A weekend getaway because it’s not like there’s anything to do here that will keep you busy for more than two days.

But that’s in the summer mainly, when people actually come. Nobody comes now. Nobody but her.

Our café is far enough off the beaten path that where we sit at the far edge of town the shops and restaurants give way to homes. It’s an assorted mix, really—a souvenir shop to the north, a bed-and-breakfast to the south. On the opposite side of the sett street is a psychologist’s office, followed by a succession of single-family homes. Condos. A gas station. Another souvenir shop, closed until spring.

A waitress passes by, snaps her fingers before my eyes. “Table two,” she says, a waitress I call Red. They’re all just nicknames to me: Red, Braids, Braces. “Table two needs to be cleared.”

But I don’t move. I continue to stare. I give her a nickname, too, because it feels like the right thing to do. The woman staring out the window is building castles in the air. Daydreaming. It’s a big deal, really, something different happening around here when nothing different ever happens. If Nick or Adam were still around, and not away at college, I’d call them up and tell them about the girl that showed up today. About her eyes, about her hair. And they’d want to know the details: whether or not she really was different than the dime-a-dozen girls we see every day, the same girls we’ve known since first grade. And I’d tell them that she is.

My grandfather used to call my grandmother—also a brunette, though in my lifetime I’d never seen her as anything other than a mass of weblike gray—Cappuccetta. The nickname Cappuccetta purportedly came from the monks of Capuchin, or so my Italian grandfather claimed, something about the hoods they wore bearing resemblance to the coffee drink, a cappuccino. That’s what Grandpa said, anyway, when he looked my grandmother in the eye and called her Cappuccetta.

Me, I just like the sound of it. And it seems to suit this girl well, the modicum of brunette hair, the ambiguity that surrounds her like the hood of a monk’s cowl. But I’m not a coffee drinker, and so instead my eyes drop to her narrow wrist where there sits a pearl bracelet that looks much too small for even her small hand. It’s pulled taut, the elastic cord showing through the creamy beads. I imagine it leaves a red imprint along the skin. The pearl beads are worn along the edges, losing their sheen. I watch as she plucks habitually at the band, pulling the elastic up off the skin, and allowing it to snap back again. It’s mesmerizing, almost, that simple movement. Pluck. Pluck. Pluck. I watch for a while, unable to shift my eyes from the bracelet or her fluid hands.

And that’s what cinches it. Not Cappuccetta, I decide. I’ll call her Pearl instead.

Pearl.

It’s then that a cluster of churchgoers appear, the same ones who arrive every week about this same time. They claim their usual table, a rectangular slab that seats all ten. They’re delivered carafes of coffee—one half-caf, the other leaded—though no one asks. It’s assumed. Because this is what they do every Sunday morning: cluster around the same table, talking passionately about things like sermons and pastors and scripture.

The waitress Braids disappears for three consecutive smoke breaks so that when she returns she reeks of a cigarette factory, her teeth a pale yellow as she dribbles another inadequate tip into the pocket of her apron and moans. A dollar fifty, all in quarters.

She excuses herself and heads to the restroom.

The café takes on a vibe of normalcy, though with Pearl in the room—the lady with the ombré hair, staring out the window at the colorful homes and the redbrick buildings across the way—things are anything but normal. She eats from the plate of food now set before her: scrambled eggs with an English muffin on the side, smothered in butter and strawberry jam. A second cup of coffee splashed with two tubs of creamer and sprinkled with a single sugar substitute, the pink stuff, which she drinks without ever bothering to stir. I find myself staring, unable to take my eyes off her hands, and she raises the mug to her lips and sips.

It’s then that the sound of Priddy’s thin, metallic voice summons me by name, interrupting my thoughts. “Alex,” she says to me, and as I turn, I see her long, crooked finger draw me to her side, her fingernails painted a cantaloupe orange. Before Priddy, on the display case, is a cardboard box and a plastic cup complete with fountain drink. Inside the box are a BLT with a mountain of fries and a pickle on the side. Same as always. We don’t do deliveries, but for Ingrid Daube we do. And today it’s my turn to go. Usually I look forward to the trips to Ingrid’s home—a break from the mundane routine of the café—but today isn’t one of those days. Today I’d rather stay.

“Me?” I ask stupidly, staring at the box, and Priddy says, “Yes, you, Alex. You.”

I sigh.

“Take this to Ingrid,” Priddy says to me, with no please and no thank-you, but rather an edict: “Go.” I loiter a fraction of a second, my eyes on the woman with the ombré hair—Pearl—as Red passes by and refills her coffee mug for a third time.

Pearl has been here for an hour now, maybe two, and although she finished her meal long ago, she doesn’t go. The dishes have been cleared. It’s been a good thirty minutes since Red placed the check on the table beside the coffee mug. The waitress has asked three times if there’s anything else she needs, but the girl only shakes her head and says no. Red is getting antsy, eager to gather up another measly tip that she can complain about as soon as Pearl decides to split. And yet she doesn’t split. She remains at the window, gazing out, sipping coffee with no apparent plans to go.

I tell myself I’ll hurry. That I’ll be back before she leaves.

Why? I don’t know why. For some reason I want to be here when she goes, to watch her put the black hat back on her head, obscuring the ombré hair. To watch her wrap the scarf around her neck and gather the canvas bag in her hands. To see her slip into the checkered pea coat. To see her rise up off the chair, to see which way she goes.

I tell myself I’ll hurry; I’ll be back before she leaves. I say it again. If I time it just right, maybe she’ll be leaving just as I return—back from my delivery to Ingrid. Maybe.

I’ll hold the door for her. I’ll say to her, Have a nice day.

I’ll ask her her name. New to town? I’ll say.

Maybe. If I time it right.

Also, if I’m not being a chicken shit, which I probably will be.

I don’t bother to put on my coat for a quick trip across the street. I grab the box and the drink and slip through the glass door backward, using my backside to open the door for me. The wind nearly swipes the box from my hands as I step outside, and I think it’s times like these that I wish I had hair. More hair. Much more hair than the burr cut on my head, which does nothing to keep my scalp and ears warm. I could use a hat, too, and my coat. Instead, I wear my café-issued attire: the cheap, pleated pants, the white button-down shirt and a black bow tie. It’s tacky, the kind of thing I’d prefer not to have to be seen in public in. But Priddy gives me no choice. The sleeves of my shirt flutter in the breeze, the wind getting trapped beneath the polyester, making it puff up like a parachute or a birthday balloon. It’s cold outside, the air temperature reaching no more than forty degrees. The windchill is another story. The windchill—also known as the one thing everyone will be talking about for the next four months to come. Only November and already meteorologists are calling for a cold winter, one of the coldest on record, they say, with subzero temps, record windchills and bounteous snow.

It’s winter in Michigan, for God’s sake. What else is new?

Ingrid Daube lives in a Cape Cod right across the street from the café, a small Cape Cod circa 1940-or 1950-something. It’s a light blue house with dark blue shutters, a roof almost as tall as it is wide. It’s a good house, a charming house. Quaint and idyllic, save for the hustle and bustle of the main street, which does anything but hustle or bustle this time of year. It’s quiet. From Ingrid’s upstairs dormer window, she has a bird’s-eye view of the café and there I see her, standing in the window like an apparition, eyes watching mine as I wait for a passing car and then scamper across the street. She waves at me through the glass. I return the wave and watch as she disappears from view.

I start climbing the steps of Ingrid’s wide, white front porch, and that’s when I hear the high-pitched squeal of a squeaky door hinge, followed by the slamming of a screen door from the home next door, a blue cottage converted into an office for Dr. Giles, the town shrink. It’s been less than a year since he moved his practice in. As I peek over, there he stands in the doorway, saying goodbye to a patient before peering up and down the street—hands in pockets—as if waiting for someone else to appear. Does he hug her? I’m quite certain he does, an awkward one-armed hug not meant to happen in plain sight. That’s what makes it weird. He checks his watch. He looks left, he looks right, up and down the street. Someone is late, and Dr. Giles doesn’t want to be kept waiting. He seems miffed that he has to wait. I see it in his squinty eyes, in his vertical posture, in the way his arms are crossed.

I don’t like the man one bit.

The patient who leaves thrusts a hood up over her head, a fur-lined hood on a thick black parka, though whether it’s for warmth or privacy, I can’t say. I don’t know. I never do see her face before she scurries away, down the street the other way. I don’t see her, but I hear her. Half the town hears her. I hear her crying, a distraught wail that can be heard a half block away. He made her cry. Dr. Giles made the girl cry. Add that to the list of reasons I don’t like the guy.

There was a whole scandal when Dr. Giles moved his office into the tiny blue cottage. A scandal because the ladies in town took to lurking around the café, to puttering up and down the street, so they could see the comings and goings of Dr. Giles’s clientele: which of the town’s members was seeing the headshrinker and why. Proving what people hated most about small-town living: there is no such thing as privacy.

Ours really is the paradigm of a small town. We’ve got one stoplight, and we’ve got a town drunk and everybody knows who the town drunk is: my father. Everyone gossips. There’s nothing better to do than throw one another under the bus. And so we do.

Ingrid opens the door before I knock. She opens the door and I step inside, wiping my shoes on the woven floor mat. She smiles. Ingrid is about the same age my mother would be if my mother were still here. Don’t get me wrong, my mother’s not dead (though sometimes I wish she was dead), she’s just not here. Ingrid has one of those short hairdos forty-or fifty-year-old women sometimes have, the color of wet sand. She has welcoming eyes. She has a nice smile, but a sad smile. There isn’t a person in town who could say a bad thing about Ingrid, but rather the bad things that have happened to Ingrid. That’s what they talk about. Ingrid’s life is the definition of tragic. She’s gotten the short end of the stick, that’s for sure, and as a result she’s become the town’s charity case, a fifty-year-old woman too terrified to step foot out of her own home. She has panic attacks any time she does, chest pressure, trouble breathing. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, though I don’t know her whole story. I make it a point not to meddle in others’ business, and yet I’ve seen Ingrid get loaded into an ambulance and whisked off to the emergency room when she thought that she was dying. Turned out everything was fine. Just fine. Just an ordinary case of agoraphobia, as if it’s ordinary for a fifty-year-old woman to stay in her home because she’s scared to death of the world outside. She doesn’t leave her house for anything, not to get the mail or water a flower or pick a weed. Within the gypsum walls she’s perfectly fine, but outside these walls is another story.

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.

Alex

I wait for hours for the girl to return—trying hard to stare through the window coverings of Dr. Giles’s cottage office—but she doesn’t show. I consider sneaking into that space between Ingrid and Dr. Giles’s home, standing on tiptoes to try and see in. I contemplate a return visit to Ingrid’s home—feigning I forgot something, that I needed something—to try and catch a glimpse from her kitchen window. I imagine that Pearl is in there, in Dr. Giles’s cottage, doing what people do in a shrink’s office: sitting on a sofa, spilling her guts to a man who gets his kicks listening to other people’s problems. But then the time goes by—thirty minutes, an hour, two hours—until I tell myself it’s been too long for her to be in there, chatting it up with Dr. Giles. No psychiatry appointment lasts two hours. Or do they? I’m not one to know.

In time, I give up. She’s not in there, I tell myself. But of course I’m not sure. I can only guess.

In the middle of the afternoon, I go home. I retrace the steps I made this morning, down the streets of town, past the small stores that are closing up shop for the night, flipping Open signs to Closed, locking the doors. I’m tired; my feet hurt. My head swims with the image of that girl at the window, here one minute, gone the next.

The streets are paved with setts, rectangular granite blocks like cobblestones. The two restaurants remain open, but the boutique stores—the cutesy one with baby stuff in the front window and the one that carries nothing other than novelty items and a poor selection of cheesy, overpriced greeting cards—will soon close. The streets are sleepy, the gray sky contemplating rain. To the side of the road, there’s a big, black crow feasting on a rabbit carcass: roadkill. Everyone gets a little desperate this time of year. A squirrel scampers across a telephone wire, praying the crow doesn’t see. Down the street a group of preteen boys in shorts and T-shirts walk home, as if unaffected by the cold. The sound of their laughter cuts through the autumn air. One of them puffs on the end of a smoke; he can’t be older than twelve or thirteen.

I pull my hood up over my head. I tuck my hands into the pockets of my pants and walk quickly, head down, through town, past the carousel, and to the beach.

The town is lonesome and I am feeling blue.

I think of my pals Nick and Adam and Percy, off at college, having the time of their lives. Meanwhile, I’m thinking of some girl I don’t even know, may never see again, likely a head case, too.

The lake pounds the shore, no different than it did this morning. It’s only in daylight that I can see the choppy waves out at sea, the steady flow of whitecaps that charge the sand, livid and swift like knights on horseback—a charging cavalry. The sand is a washed-out brown. The lake has a smell to it, not an unpleasant one, but one that just smells soggy and wet and cold. The sand sticks to my black gym shoes as I make my way past the tall beach grass, the dense bursts that emerge through the sand. The grass is brown and brittle now. No longer green. Soon it will be gone, torn from its roots by the cold and the wind and the snow. My eyes rove the sand for crinoid stems—the tiny disks I find in the gravel and in the sand—just as they always do. It’s a fixation for me, a weakness, a habit. Crinoid stems, Indian beads, sea lilies. It’s all the same to me, the fossils of prehistoric creatures that once inhabited Lake Michigan. I gather a crinoid stem from the sand and admire it in the palm of my hand. Much more beautiful than shale or basalt rock to me; much more meaningful than granite or slag, though, really, they’re nothing much to look at. People string jewelry with these, but me, I collect them in a Ziploc bag. For now, I slide it into the pocket of my pants, holding tight, careful not to let go.

There’s a couple out on the pier, a man and a woman, not far out, but far enough to get the gist of it without being knocked into the water by the wind. They hold each other by the hand—steadying one another in the stubborn gale—as they take in the sweeping lake views and the apocalyptic sky, and then they turn and go, trooping to a car parked in the adjoining lot, stomping the sand off their shoes as they do.

But I don’t go. I stay, taking it all in for myself.

It’s only after they’ve left and I’ve watched the black car spin out of the lot and out of town that I see her sitting all alone on the playground’s belt swing, her feet dragging through the sand below. Her hands clutch the chain, though she doesn’t pump her legs, allowing the wind to move the swing for her. It’s a measured swing to say the least, deliberate and lazy, as one does when they’re thinking about something else and not at all about the swing.

Pearl.

Her coat is on; her hat is on. Her hands are ungloved and look to me to be cold. Her scarf is wrapped around her neck, though the wind grabs it by either end and pulls, so that the scarf floats this way and that on the current of the wayward wind. It’s begun to rain—just a slight drizzle—something she seems repellent to, as if she’s waterproof. She doesn’t seem to mind the rain, which pelts me in the eyeballs and soaks my insides. I can’t stand the rain. I could scurry home; I should scurry home. I should run. But I don’t. Instead, I move to a covered spot, a picnic area with wooden tables and, more importantly, a roof. I sit on the timber tabletop, a solid fifty feet from where Pearl sits.

She doesn’t see me.

But I see her.

Quinn

When I get to the end of the note, I have one, simple, undeterred thought: Who the hell is My Dearest? I have to ask Esther about this. I just have to. The last line screams over and over again in my ear: Did you see me? Were you trying to make me mad?

I want to ask Esther, Who?

I scurry out into the living room to see if she’s come home yet, slipped in quietly while I was in her bedroom. I half expect to see her sitting on the rose-colored sofa, crisscross-applesauce as she says to those tiny tykes at the bookshop’s story time. I picture myself confronting Esther about the note, thrusting the typed sheet of paper under her nose. Who is My Dearest? I ask. I see myself shake that note in front of her rueful face and demand to know, Who is he?

A line runs through my mind: Or maybe that was something she came up with all on her own: leaving the lights on so that I could see. It was, after all, her victory.

In my musings I shake Esther by the shoulders and ask over and over again: Who is she? Who is she, Esther? as Esther’s face turns contrite and she begins to cry.

But no. I wouldn’t do that to Esther. I wouldn’t want to see her cry.

But still, I want to know. Who is she?

Of course it doesn’t matter, anyway, because when I come barreling out of the bedroom she’s not there. Of course she’s not there. It’s just me and an empty room. The TV is off and so other than the hiss of the radiator the room is silent. The room itself screams of Esther, all the mismatched furniture she owned before I moved in: the rose-colored sofa, the industrial iron coffee table, a mod plaid chair in black and white, throw pillows in moss and yellow and blue. And then, of course, there was the frieze rug that we carried home together from some yard sale on Summerdale—my only contribution to the decor save from, of course, me. We must have walked three blocks with that rug, Esther in front, me in the rear, laughing all along the way from the sheer weight of it, from the fact that it was a bilious green. I take in the walls of the apartment themselves, a blinding white, which we’re prohibited from painting by order of Mrs. Budny. Mrs. Budny, an eighty-nine-year-old Pole who lives in the unit beneath us, and also my landlord. The walls instead are covered in coat hooks and candleholders and a dry-erase board where Esther and I leave each other curt little messages, missives and other forms of communiqué.

Pick up milk.

Did you eat my cheese?

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Ran out. Be home soon.

It’s lonely, I realize again then. The apartment is lonely without Esther home.

I pick up my phone to call Ben, a coworker and also a friend. Ben is, more or less, the only person I talk to at work unless of course I’m being paid to talk to them. The lawyers who beckon me to fetch files and make photocopies—I only speak to them because I have to speak to them. It’s required. Part of the job description essentially.

But Ben I speak to because I want to. Because I like him. Because he’s nice.

He’s also handsome as all get-out, a twenty-three-year-old PA like me, though one with legitimate plans of law school ahead. But he’s got a girlfriend. A college coed, another law school hopeful like him. As soon as she finishes up a prelaw degree at UIC, they’ll both apply for law school together in Washington, DC. So romantic. His girlfriend’s name is Priya, a name that even sounds beautiful.

I’ve never met her in person, Priya, but I’ve seen the assemblage of photographs Ben stores in his smallish office cube: photos of Priya alone, photos of Ben and Priya, photos of Priya and Ben’s dog, a one-eyed Chihuahua named Chance (and if that doesn’t say something about the size of Ben’s heart, I don’t know what does).

I find Ben’s number in my call history and click on his name, and then proceed to listen to the phone ring five shrill times before it sends me to voice mail. I listen to Ben’s message, the simple and robotic and yet entirely charming sound of his voice as he says, This is Ben. Leave a message. I could listen to that message on repeat all night. But I don’t. Instead, when the phone beeps, I take my cue and leave a vague message. “Hey,” I say. “It’s Quinn. I have to talk to you. Call me back, okay?” I don’t say a thing about Esther. That’s not the kind of message you leave on a voice mail; it’s tacky. Important things aren’t meant for voice mail. I’ve been dumped that way before, and so I should know. I’ll fill Ben in when he calls back, but then I picture Ben and Priya together and wonder when he’ll call back, or if any of this will matter any more when he does. Esther will surely be home soon, I think, although now I’m not so sure.

I sit on the sofa all alone and watch as the apartment is besieged by blackness. Nighttime. The only light derives from a streetlamp or two outside our apartment window—and even those are few and far between—our little residential Chicago neighborhood too far from the Loop to be illuminated by the likes of the Willis Tower or Donald Trump’s posh hotel. As darkness takes over, I start to fill with a sense of unease. Where is Esther? Esther has done strange things before, don’t get me wrong, but never before has she left me for a whole day without saying where she was going or when she’d be home. Never before has she climbed out that fire escape window and disappeared into the darkness of night. I stare at the clock on the wall and realize it’s been twelve long hours since Esther’s alarm clock first woke me from sleep, and still she’s not here.

I start to worry. What if something has happened to Esther, something bad?

And so I contemplate a second phone call. Not to Ben this time, of course, but to the police. Should I call the police? My mind vacillates back and forth between Call the police and Don’t call the police like a game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe, before landing on Call the police. And so I do. I dial 311, the city’s nonemergency phone number, as opposed to 911. This isn’t an emergency, or at least I don’t think it is. I pray it’s not an emergency. A woman answers the phone, and I picture her, some telephone operator, sitting at a computer desk with a headset on her head, flattening her hair.

At the operator’s request, I state the nature of my nonemergency. “My roommate,” I tell her, “is missing.” And then I fill her in on the details of Esther’s quick departure—the window, the screen, the fire escape.

She listens attentively, but when I’m through, her words are wary. “Have you checked the local hospitals?” she asks.

“No,” I admit, feeling suddenly like a fool, “I haven’t.”

It didn’t occur to me for one split second that Esther might be hurt.

“That’s a great place to start.” And I gather from her comment that calling the police isn’t a great place to start. “You’ve checked in with your roommate’s family? Other friends?” she asks, at which I shake my head in silent admission. I did not. Well, I called Ben, that’s one step in the right direction, but I didn’t even think of calling Esther’s family, not that I know a phone number, anyway, or have the slightest clue how to find it. I don’t even know her mother’s or father’s names, nothing other than Mr. or Mrs. Vaughan, or so I assume. And I’m guessing there are tens of thousands of people in the world with the last name Vaughan. Besides, I rationalize in my head, Esther and her family aren’t close. Esther doesn’t like to talk about them, but I gather that her father’s out of the picture; her mother and she are estranged. How do I know this? Because while my own mother sends care packages galore and shows up without warning at our door, Esther’s mom doesn’t even call to say hello. I asked Esther about her family once; she said she didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t ask again. One time a card arrived, but Esther let it sit on the kitchen table for four days, unopened, before throwing it in the trash.

“Any reason to believe there was foul play?” the operator asks, and I say no. “Does the missing person have a medical condition that would make the issue life-threatening?” she asks, and again I say no. Her voice is detached and unfriendly, as if she doesn’t care. She probably doesn’t, but you’d think an emergency or nonemergency operator would have at least a scant amount of sympathy. I almost want to make something up, to tell this woman that Esther is diabetic and that she’s left all her insulin at home, or that she has asthma and is without an inhaler. Then maybe this woman would show concern. Maybe I should tell her the window screen was gashed, the glass broken in. That there was blood, a pool of it, enough for Esther to have completely bled out. Then maybe I’d be redirected to 911 and suddenly Esther’s disappearance would be deemed an emergency.

Or maybe the operator is trying to clue me in to something: this isn’t an emergency; Esther is fine. She says to me then, “Nearly seventy percent of missing people leave of their own free will and return within forty-eight to seventy-two hours, voluntarily. You’re more than welcome to come to the station and file a missing-persons report, though there’s only so much the police can do in the case of missing adults. Without evidence of foul play, we can’t immediately think something criminal has happened. People are allowed to up and disappear if they want to. But if you file a report, your roommate will be placed in a missing-persons database and our investigators will look into it.

“Does your roommate drink, do drugs?” she asks then, and I quickly shake my head and say no. Well, Esther does drink, a margarita here, a daiquiri there, but she isn’t an alcoholic or anything.

It’s then that the operator asks about Esther’s mental state—does she suffer from depression?—and I picture Esther’s magnanimous smile and think to myself that she can’t be. She just can’t be.

“No,” I say without delay, “of course not.”

“Did you two get into an argument recently?” she asks, and I realize she’s trying to insinuate that I did something to hurt Esther. Did Esther and I get into an argument? Of course not. But was Esther upset that I went out last night without her, though she’d told me to go? I don’t know. I reiterate to myself that she told me to go. I’d be a killjoy, Quinn. Go without me. You’ll have more fun. That’s exactly what she said. So how could she be mad?

“We didn’t get into an argument,” I say, and the operator leaves me with two options: I can come in and file a missing-persons report, or I can wait it out.

I feel silly for calling the operator, and so I decide to wait it out. The last thing I need to do is stare an officer in the eye and feel like a fool in person. I have plenty of experience with this. I’ll call the hospitals; I’ll try and track Esther’s family down. I’ll wait for Ben to call, and with any luck, Esther will come home of her own free will, just like the operator said, within forty-eight to seventy-two hours. Two to three days. Two to three days, I think. I don’t know if I can wait that long for Esther to come home.

I hang up with the operator and will Ben to call. Please, Ben, please, I silently beg. Please call. But Ben doesn’t call. I search online for the numbers of the closest area hospitals, starting with Methodist, and then I call, asking the receptionists one by one if Esther is there. I state her name and then I describe her—the shaded hair, the heterochromatic eyes, the ungrudging smile—knowing that Esther has that kind of face that once you’ve seen it, you never forget. But Esther isn’t at Methodist Hospital or Weiss or any of the local urgent care facilities. I lose hope with each apathetic reply. No Esther Vaughan here.

I’m feeling lost and alone when I hear the sound of a telephone ringing. Not my phone, but a phone. Esther’s phone, which I know from the ringtone, some 1980s Billboard hit that nobody listens to anymore.

Esther’s ringtone. Esther’s phone.

Esther’s not here, so why is her phone?

I rise to my feet to find it.

Alex

I wonder if she has any idea she’s being watched.

I watch the girl twitch her hands, scratch her head. I watch her cross her legs this way—and then that way—on the park swing, trying to get comfortable. Then she uncrosses her legs and kicks at the sand. She looks left, right, and then peers upward and opens her mouth to catch droplets of rainwater falling from the sky.

I have no idea how long I stare. Long enough that my hands go numb from the cold and the rain.

It’s after some time that the girl rises to her feet and stands. Her feet, in the chestnut-colored Uggs, sink into the sand as she moves through it and toward the beach. Closer and closer to the water. It’s hard for her to move through the sand thanks to the density of it, for one, and the wind. It pushes her modest body this way and that, her arms out at her sides like the arms of a tightrope walker. One foot in front of the other. One step at a time.

And then three feet before the tide line, she stops.

And I stare.

And this is what happens. It starts with the boots first, which she draws from her feet with great balance, one foot, and then the other. She sets them side by side in the sand. The socks are next, and I think to myself, Is she crazy? Thinking she will dip her feet into the frigid waters of a November Lake Michigan. It can’t be more than forty degrees. Ice cold. The kind of water that gives rise to hypothermia.

The socks get tucked into the shaft of the boot so they don’t blow away. I watch and wait for the girl to totter to the lake’s side and walk right on in, but she doesn’t. There’s a moment that passes—or many moments, maybe, I don’t know, I’ve lost all sense of time—before she reaches for the buttons of the coat and starts to unbutton from top to bottom. And then the coat comes off. Set in the sand beside the boots and the socks. It’s as she starts to remove the jeans from her legs that I think, This can’t be happening. I peer around for another onlooker, someone, anyone, to tell me this is real and not only a figment of my imagination. Is this really happening? This can’t be happening. This can’t be real.

I’ve stood now and moved closer, two, maybe three feet, hidden behind the wooden columns that frame the picnic shelter. I wrap my hands around the columns and squint my eyes so that I can see the way Pearl unbuttons and unzips the jeans, the way she sets herself down in the wet sand and drags the denim from her legs, setting that, too, by the coat and the shoes. The rain has picked up its pace now and barrels down harder, blowing sideways in the wind. It sweeps through the orifices in the enclosed shelter space and soaks me through and through. The girl stands then, hands in the pockets of her blue hoodie, with nothing else on. Just the hoodie and a pair of underpants. And the hat and scarf.

But then the hoodie goes, too.

And it’s then that she enters the water. In nothing more than her undergarments, her scarf and a hat. She walks right in, insouciant to the cold like an emperor penguin, diving right into arctic waters. She doesn’t stop when she gets her feet wet. Or her ankles. Or her knees. She keeps going. I think she might walk right on to Chicago if she could, hands dragging along the surface of the water as the waves run up and splash her, soaking her head to toe with the lake’s callous spray.

Without realizing it, I’ve moved from the picnic shelter and stand, myself, in the sand. How did I get here? I don’t know. All common sense tells me that I should call someone for help. The police? Dr. Giles? How long does she have before the cold water leads to hypothermia? Fifteen minutes? Thirty minutes? I don’t know. But I can’t call someone because I’m completely dumbstruck and speechless, feet frozen to the sand, unable to lug my phone from the pocket of my pants. Because I can’t get my eyes off Pearl, there in the water, swimming the sidestroke, long enough to call for help. Watching the way her unhurried arms rise up out of the water one at a time, and then drop back in. The gentle, rhythmic kicking of feet in water, proffering no splash at all. The way she goes and goes without turning her head for a breath, like a fish with gills and fins.

If I had something better to do with my time, I probably wouldn’t be standing here watching her swim. But I don’t and so I stand here and watch her swim.

And there, as I stand, gawking, the girl rises up to her feet and begins a retreat from the water. While any normal human being would sprint shivering from the water and into something warm and dry, she doesn’t. Her steps are slow, calculated. She isn’t in a hurry. She takes her time, emerging from the water soaking-wet, the little she wears now completely sheer. The sand clings to her feet, her ankles, grainy sand changing colors before my eyes. Turning darker.

I would avert my eyes. I should avert my eyes.

But I can’t.

I can’t be blamed for this. What eighteen-year-old would turn his head away, refuse to look? Not me, that’s for sure. Not anyone I know.

Seems to me, anyway, that she wants to be seen.

And there she stands in the wet sand, the water likely freezing to her bare skin in the cold, autumn air. She makes no attempt to dry herself off or to get dressed. Her back is to the lake now and she takes in what’s on the other side: the playground and carousel, the beach grass and a line of vacuous trees.

And me.

And that’s when she turns to me and waves.

And I prove to the world that I really am a chickenshit when I turn and walk away, pretending I don’t see.

Quinn

I rise to my feet and follow the ringing of the phone to the kitchen, fully expecting to see Esther’s cell stashed there on the countertop beside canisters of flour, sugar and cookies. But no such luck. I’m not one to answer her phone or even notice its ring, but now I’m worried. Perhaps Esther is in trouble; perhaps she needs my help. Perhaps it’s Esther on the other end of the line calling me for help on her phone. She’s lost, doesn’t have enough cash for a cab. Something along those lines.

But she could just call me on my phone, then. Of course she could. That would make more sense. But still. Maybe...

I flip on the stove light and continue to search, tracking the subdued ringtone as Hansel and Gretel tracked bread crumbs through the deep, dark woods. It sounds far away and hard to hear, as if there’s cotton in my ears. I open and close the stove, the refrigerator, the cabinets, though it seems utterly absurd to do so. To look for a phone inside a refrigerator. But I do, anyway.

I continue on my search. The phone rings once, twice, three times. I’m nearly certain the call will go to voice mail and this will all be for naught, when I find it tucked away inside the pocket of a red zip-up hoodie that hangs from a hanger in our teeny-weeny coat closet.

I snatch up the phone, ousting the hoodie from its hanger as I do, watching it fall to the floor as I answer the call, the caller ID reading Unknown.

“Hello?” I ask, pressing the phone to my ear.

“Is this Esther Vaughan?” probes a voice on the other end of the line.

And then I utter the three words that in about thirteen seconds I’ll regret having said. “No, it’s not,” I say, wishing instantly that I would have said, This is she. But then again, why would I when my interest has yet to be piqued? It takes much more than a blocked phone number to get my attention. I get blocked calls all the time, mainly debt collectors calling to collect unpaid bills. Old credit cards with cringe-worthy balances I haven’t made payments to in years. Student loans.

“Is she there?” asks the voice. It’s a gruff voice, a male voice, that isn’t going to fool around with any pleasantries or wisecracks or banter.

“No,” I say, and then, “Can I take a message?” I ask as my hand fumbles through the near-darkness for the dry-erase board and a marker. I drift across the room to the board that hangs aslant from a wall, fully prepared to jot down a name and phone number below the arcane message: Ran out. Be home soon, a phrase that suddenly takes on an abundance of meaning.

Ran out. Be home soon.

Esther wrote that. I know she did. It’s not my handwriting; it’s hers. The fusion of cursive and print, upper-and lowercase words. Both feminine and masculine all at the same time.

But when did she leave the message, I wonder, and why?

Was it last week when she ran back to the bookshop to find her forgotten faux glasses? Or just a couple days ago when she hurried to the Edgewater branch of the Chicago Public Library on Broadway to return a book before closing time, so that it wouldn’t be late? Esther is a stickler for returning books on time.

Or, I wonder then while waiting for the guy on the other end of the cell phone to decide whether or not he’s going to leave a message, did she leave the annotation last night before she opened her bedroom window and climbed on out? That’s it, then, I tell myself. There’s no reason to be worried. Esther left me a note; she’ll be home soon. It says so right there on the board.

Ran out. Be home soon.

And then to my dismay, the man on the other end of the line curtly replies, “It’s a confidential matter.” His voice is ticked off. “We had an appointment this afternoon. She didn’t show.”

Apparently that information—Esther’s sloppy, negligent behavior—isn’t quite as confidential as who he is or why he’s calling. There are voices in the background that I try hard to decrypt: cars, the lapping sound of ocean waves, a blender. I can’t be sure. It all fuses together until it is one thing and one thing alone: noise. Clamor. Racket. A whole hullabaloo.

“I can tell her you called,” I suggest, exploring for a name. A reason for calling.

“I’ll call back,” he says instead, and the line goes dead. I stand there in the kitchen, my bare feet cold on the black-and-white checkerboard tile, watching as, in my hand, the cell phone screen fades to black. I press the home button and swipe my finger across the screen. The phone prompts me for Esther’s password. Password? My heart starts to race. Damn!

I start pressing digits at random until I’m locked out of the phone altogether, the device disabled, and I’m stuck waiting an entire minute—sixty long, maddening seconds—until I can do it again. And again. And again.

I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, nor the brightest crayon in the box. I’ve been told as much before. So it shouldn’t surprise me in the least bit that I have no idea how to break into Esther’s phone without her password or thumbprint. And yet it does.

I placate myself with the simple fact that he promised to call back. The gruff voice on the other end of the line said that he would call back.

I’ll do better the next time, I tell myself. I will.

Alex

It’s evening at my house. I’m cooking. Pops is watching TV, feet on the old coffee table, a bottle of beer in his hand. He’s drunk, but he’s not wasted. He still knows his left hand from his right, which is a big accomplishment some days. He was awake when I got home from work this evening. Also a big accomplishment. Seems he managed a shower, too. He’d changed out of his striped shirt and no longer reeked of the god-awful cologne or the rank morning breath as he did when I left for work that morning. Now he just reeks of booze.

On the TV is a football game. The Detroit Lions. He screams at the TV.

There are chicken nuggets in the oven and a can of green beans warming on the stove. Pops wanders through the kitchen for another beer and asks if I’d like one, too. I look him in the blasted eyes and say, “I’m eighteen,” though I’m not sure that means too much to him. On the fridge door is a picture I drew about a dozen years ago of outer space: the sun, the moon, the stars, Neptune and Jupiter, in Crayola crayons. Worn along the edges, a corner missing, having fallen from its magnet about a million times. The colors are faded. Everything, these days, seems like it’s starting to fade.

Sharing the same magnet is a postcard from my mother. I threw it in the trash when it arrived in the mail, but Pops found it there, mixed up with lunch meat scraps and corn kernels, and pulled it back out again. This one’s from San Antonio. The Alamo, it says.

You shouldn’t be so hard on her, he’d said to me when he found the postcard in the trash. And then that line was trailed by the same one it always was when Pops talked about my mom. She did the best that she could do.

If you say so, was what I’d said before leaving the room. I wonder if it’s possible to hate someone and feel sorry for them at the same time? I felt sorry for her, sure. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother.

But I also hate her, too.

Pops is a lousy drunk, and the more he drinks, the more he thinks about my mother. About the way she left us all those years ago, without ever saying goodbye. About the fact that he still has their wedding photo framed and hung on the bedroom wall, about the fact that he still wears his wedding band, though she’s been gone a whole thirteen years. Since I was five. A little boy with Legos and Star Wars toys. That’s when she left.

If it was up to me I would have chucked that ring long ago. Not that I hold a grudge or anything, because I don’t. I just think I would have tossed the ring. Or pawned it like he pawned my high school class ring for booze. Instead, it becomes a hot topic of conversation in the many botched dates Pops has with the single ladies around town—a reservoir that is drying up quickly and will soon be completely sapped. Chances are he’s dated them all. Except for Ingrid, maybe, the agoraphobic, for reasons I don’t need to explain. Pops spends his dates at the tavern in town, getting loaded and talking about how my mother left him and me when I was five years old. It’s supposed to be a sympathy trigger, but instead he ends up looking like a patsy. Pops ends up crying and scaring the ladies away one by one, like old cans lined in a row for target practice.

He has no clue why he’s still alone.

It’s pathetic, really. But he’s still my dad and I feel sorry for him, too.

I dish the nuggets and green beans onto a chipped dinner plate and call him to dinner, where he lumbers in—beer in hand—and takes his place at the head of the table, the only chair from which he can still see the TV. “Catch the fucking ball!” he screams, smacking the table hard with the palm of a sweaty hand, sending his fork spiraling into the air before it crashes down to the ground. As he reaches down to grab it, he smacks his head on the corner of the wood table and curses. And then he laughs as his forehead swells and turns bright red.

Just another night in our house.

Tonight we don’t make small talk. Instead, I model good behavior, the way you’re supposed to use a knife to spread butter, the way you’re supposed to eat the beans with a fork and not your hands. I watch as Pops drags half of a dinner roll through the tub of margarine and think: no wonder this guy is still single. He had a lot more to offer my mother when he was young, employed and sober. Needless to say, he’s no longer any of those things. But the reason she left had nothing to do with any of those things, anyway. The reason she left? Motherhood. Me.

I try not to let this go to my head.

“They’re not French fries,” I say as he plucks the fancy-cut green beans up one at a time with a hand, drawing them to his mouth and chewing with his jaws open wide. “Use your fork.” He ignores me and screams at the TV, spittle flying out. Green spittle, like the beans.

He rises to his feet and hollers, “False start!” pointing a finger at the referees on TV as if they can hear. “What are you, asshole, are you blind? That was a false start.”

And then he sits back down.

I watch as he sits there at the table, eating his food. I note the way his hands shake. Pops has a tremor, whether or not he knows it exists. I know. His hands shake, the small, rapid movements when he’s trying to use his hands for something: picking up his nuggets, snapping the top off another bottle of beer. They remind me of my grandpa’s hands, though his only shook because he was old. There are times Pops’s hands shake so badly I have to open up his beer for him. The incongruity of it? The more he drinks, the less his hands shake, like some sort of paradoxical reaction. The hands find placidity when he’s completely tanked. Seems to me it should be the other way around, but still, the shaking hands are a good benchmark for me of how much he’s had to drink. It’s never worth asking how much he’s had to drink; he’s either too drunk to remember, otherwise he’ll lie. Tonight, not enough.

He stands up again quickly to chastise the coach who decides to run it up the middle instead of a sweep play. And then back down. And then up again when the ball gets knocked out of the running back’s hands and there’s an interception—this time managing to overturn his chair as he does. He watches in dismay as the Giants trot down the field with the ball. I don’t even have to turn my head to see the TV. He narrates it for me before tossing the other half of his dinner roll at the screen. And then he gets up to get another beer, damning to hell every Lions player on the field.

So it’s really no wonder then that when he says, “Squatters,” I don’t pay much attention. He’s talking about the TV. It’s someone’s last name, or some epithet he’s come up with for one of the coaches or players. Fucking Squatters.

“Did you hear me?” he asks, and that’s when I realize he is talking to me. His shirt is wet; at some point or other he managed to spill his beer. There’s a piece of green bean stuck to his chin. Classy.

I notice that Pops isn’t looking at me, and I turn in my chair, my eyes copying his line of vision, out the front window of our home and across the street.

And there I see it again, that light: on, off.

Like an involuntary muscle contraction. A charley horse. A twitch, a tic.

On, off.

And Pops says, “Damn squatters are living over there again,” about the school-bus-yellow home on the opposite side of the street from ours. The one with the story to tell, the kind of story no one ever talks about but everybody knows. It isn’t the first time squatters have lived over there before. All sorts of vermin have inhabited the place at one time or another. The occasional drifter has been known to move into that house and live there for a while, scot-free. They usually leave on their own without any need to call the cops or anything, but it’s unsettling nonetheless, knowing there’s some bum in a vacant house right across the street from yours.

In the backyard hangs an abandoned tire swing from a fated oak tree, forgotten along with the home. Curtains hang from the window still, dated gossamer curtains, which were once white. They’re yellowish now and sheared at odd angles as if someone took a pair of scissors to their ends. Instead, it’s likely the mice eating their way through the lace. The concrete crumbles from around the house like cookie crumbs, breaking off in bits and littering the lawn. There are posted signs, which no one pays attention to, anyway: No Trespassing and Not Approved for Occupancy. They’re black signs with a bright orange font. Hard to miss. And yet people do. They ignore the signs and go right in.

A bum is living over there or maybe... No. I shake my head. That’s not it. I said it already. I don’t believe in ghosts.

But that’s just me. The rest of the people in town, they do.

Every single town in all of America has its own haunted house.

Ours just so happens to be right across the street from mine.

I never knew the family that lived inside that home. All it’s ever referred to anymore is that house. It’s been empty for years, since before I was born. I guess I never cared enough to ask who used to live there. In my mind, they’re long gone, leaving behind trace memories of a once-happy family and a derelict home. The only inhabitant people speak of is the dead Genevieve, though she is only ever referred to as her, or sometimes the even less humane it. There are claims that people see her, the ghost, moving throughout the home, her soul trapped inside for all of eternity.

But I know better than to believe those things. It’s just a bunch of malarkey. There’s no such thing as ghosts.

“Fucking squatters,” says Pops one last time as he rises from the table and stumbles to the fridge for another bottle of beer. He puts the cap on the countertop; he wanders into the family room to resume watching the football game. He leaves his dirty plate behind for me to clean, his napkin lobbed to the floor for me to retrieve.

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.

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