Don't You Cry (8 page)

Well
,
said Esther in that unselfish way that was all Esther,
he's missing out on something really great. You do know that, don't you, Quinn?
And I said yes, though of course I didn't know.
His loss
,
Esther told me, and she made me repeat it so that in time I'd start to believe.

The next weekend, Ben was back, chilling with Esther and me.

If there's anybody in the world who can help me find Esther, it's Ben.

And so there in my tiny little cube when Ben asks, “What's up?” I ask instead, clutching that tissue to my hand to clot the nearly nonexistent blood, “Want to go to lunch?” and though it's not even eleven o'clock, Ben doesn't balk.

“Let's go,” he says, and I rise from my chair and together we leave.

We go to Subway, as always, and as always I have the same thing to eat: roast beef on wheat while he has the chopped chicken salad. And it's there as we slide into the booth beside the windows, watching the city life pass by on the street, that I admit to Ben, “Esther didn't come home last night,” adding on quietly and penitently, my voice just above a whisper, “Esther didn't come home Saturday night, either.”

There's construction on Wabash and so things are loud: jackhammers, saws, sanders and such. I try to block out the noise, all of it, inside and out. The construction noise outside. The dozen or so patrons inside the restaurant beside us, hovering in a long, mushrooming line, impatient, hungry, talking on their phones. The so-called sandwich artist asking the same question over and over again like words on a scratched CD:
White or wheat? White or wheat?
I pretend for one nanosecond that it's only Ben and me in the room, that we aren't being inundated by the scent of veggies or cheese or fresh baked bread, that we're someplace romantic, say Trattoria No. 10 on Dearborn, or Everest, up on top of the Chicago Stock Exchange (a place I'll likely never get to go), dining on rack of lamb or loin of venison while staring out at the Loop from the fortieth floor. Waiters and waitresses who refer to us as
sir
and
ma'am
, who deliver champagne followed by a single sorbet for us to share with two spoons—cutlery that I probably couldn't even afford. Now that would be romantic. I imagine the force of Ben's knee pressing against me beneath the bistro table, an unswerving hand traveling across the starched white tablecloth to find mine as I admit to him sadly,
Esther didn't come home Saturday night, either
.

Ben lifts his fork to his mouth and then sets it back down, neglecting the salad before him. “What do you mean Esther didn't come home?” he asks. The concern manifests itself in puckers and folds along his forehead and temples. His hands reach to his pocket to find his phone where he pulls up his contacts and flips through to Esther.

“She might be mad at me,” I say.

“Why would she be mad at you?” he asks, and I tell him I don't know, but the truth is that I do, and it isn't any one thing, per se, but a series of things leading to the fact that I'm a bad roommate. “I don't know,” I say. “I've let her down, I guess.” But Esther has let me down, too, and now I'm mad and sad all at the same time. I watch as Ben attempts to call Esther on his cell, but with a hand to his arm, I say that it's no use.

“Her phone,” I tell him contritely, “is at home.”

And because Ben is smart, logical, systematic (all of which I'm not, making him the perfect yin to my yang), he pushes his feelings aside and focuses on the task at hand. He says, “Call the bookstore. See if she showed up for work today. What about her parents?” he asks.

“It's just her mom,” I say, or at least I think it's just her mom. Esther has never made mention of a dad, a brother, a sister, a family dog, a guinea pig, though of course there was the photograph of a family—some family,
her
family?
—inside that storage unit, the one Esther nearly amputated my finger over last December when I snuck a peek inside the box.
Who's this?
I'd asked, followed by Esther's pithy reply as she slammed the box lid down on top of my hands:
No one.

“Did you try calling her mom?” he asks then, and I shake my head.

“I don't know her name. Or her number,” I admit, though I tell him I called the police. One step in the right direction, I guess, but more likely one step forward, two steps back. I seem to be making no progress at all.

“Check Esther's phone,” he suggests, but I shrug my shoulders and say, “Can't get in. I don't have her password.”

Unless Esther's family calls us directly, that's a dead end. But Ben, not willing to concede defeat, says to me, “I'll see what I can dredge up.” He gives me a wink and says, “I have connections,” though I doubt he does. More likely he's handy on the internet and has a log-in for LexisNexis. That's about the only bonus of working for a law firm, access to a database that allows for a search of public records and background checks.

I'm feeling frustrated, to say the least, like I can't do anything quite right. I'm not one to cry, but for a whole two seconds I think that's exactly what I'd like to do. I'd like to smash my face into my Subway napkin and cry my eyes out. But that's when Ben reaches across the table and runs a brisk hand across mine. I try not to read more into it than there is—just a friendly gesture—but it's hard not to completely liquefy when he says to me, “I doubt Esther's mad at you. You're best buds,” and I think to myself that I thought we were, I thought Esther and I were best buds. But now I'm not so sure.

“So you'll call the bookstore and I'll hunt down Esther's mom. We'll find her,” he promises. “We will.” And at this I realize I like the sound of his voice, the take-charge, no-nonsense way he's made this task his own, and I smile because my lone manhunt for the missing Esther Vaughan has now become a two-man job. And I'm quite pleased with my partner in crime.

Alex

I stand at the door to Ingrid Daube's house, noticing the way the yard snowballs with fallen leaves. I make note of this: bring a rake. Rake Ingrid's leaves. It's the least that I can do.

It's not like she can do it herself because that would involve going outdoors and that isn't about to happen. The snow will come soon. I don't want her grass to die.

I carry two paper sacks in my hands. In my pocket is her change, a dollar and seventy-three cents. I have one bag in either arm. I lift up a leg and depress the doorbell with a knee, waiting for Ingrid to answer my call.

Outside there is sun. It's not warm—far from it, in fact—but there is sun. The day is crisp. The gulls are clamorous this morning, making a rumpus. They soar overhead in their colonies, perching on the roofs on the town's buildings and awnings.

When Ingrid opens the door, there's a frowzy look to her. Hair mussed up, she's still in a nightgown and robe. Her skin lacks makeup, and there are trenches in the folds of her skin, deep marionette lines made visible without the camouflage of makeup. One thought and one thought alone comes to mind: Ingrid looks old.

She says to me, “Good morning,” and I say, “Good morning” back. But today her voice is clipped, and she ushers me in quickly, pushing the door closed against the weight of the wind. She does it in a hurry, trying hard to keep the outside air out. This is Ingrid sometimes. Sometimes the fear of the outside world starts and ends at the doorsill, and so long as her feet are behind the threshold, she's A-okay. But other times she fears the air itself: germs, pollen, pollution, smoke, breath and whatever other horrors the air may hold. Today is apparently one of those days. She pulls me in by the arm—eyes doing a quick sweep of the street outside to make certain I haven't been trailed, that the wind isn't lying in wait behind me, ready and waiting to attack—and slams the door at once, latching the lock and the dead bolt, too.

And then she takes a deep breath, exhales and smiles.

Phew, says that smile. That was a close call.

Ingrid has good days and Ingrid has bad days, but it really isn't any of my business which is which, and so I pretend not to see or care. I don't know much about agoraphobia, but I do know that the mailman brings her mail to her door sometimes, when there's so much stuffed inside he can no longer close the door. A little neighbor boy lugs her trash bins to the curb. I, or some other twerp like me, run her errands. From what I know, it started with a panic attack at the market in town. It was a Saturday in summer a few years back, and it was crazy busy around here. The market was packed, and so that's what the rumor mill blames for Ingrid's very public panic attack. The crowds. It was also hot out, stiflingly hot, hard to breathe. The lines were seemingly endless, swarming with people she'd never seen before and didn't know. Tourists. Some bystanders saw her grope at her neck, gasp for air; others heard her scream,
Go away
and
Leave me alone
, and so they did, phoning 911 to help instead.
Don't touch me!
Ingrid purportedly screamed.

The fear of a repeat attack is what keeps Ingrid inside these days. The fear of losing control, the prospect of dying in the local market with everyone watching on, staring, pointing fingers. She's never said as much, but that's what I assume. 'Cause that's the last place in the world I would want to die, at the local market, surrounded by the smell of fish fillets and tourists.

Ingrid takes a bag from my hands and I follow her into the kitchen where, spread across the farmhouse table, is a deck of cards. She's playing solitaire. How sad. She's got a pad of paper set beside the cards, ticking off the times she wins a game. She's up three to one.

Also on the table are all of Ingrid's beading supplies. The ribbons and the wires and the cords. Beads and clasps. Empty cardboard jewelry boxes. A rainbow of tissue paper. A handwritten list of orders that need to be filled. Trapped at home and yet surprisingly resourceful, Ingrid manages to make her own beaded jewelry and run an online shop. Supplies are delivered to her, while the mail carrier collects the outgoing packages, pint-size jewelry boxes with necklaces or earrings tucked inside. Ingrid makes a living without ever having to step foot outside her home. She tried to show me how to make her jewelry once, a necklace for no one in particular, not as if I had someone to give a necklace to. But still, my bungling hands couldn't figure out how to bend the wire, how to put on the beads. Ingrid smiled at me sweetly—this was years ago—and confessed that I made a lousy apprentice. After that I stuck to running her errands and delivering her meals. But still, she made me a necklace, nothing girlish or sissified, but rather a shark's tooth necklace on an adjustable cord with just a few black and white beads.
For strength and protection
,
she told me as she set it in my hands. She said it as if I was in need of these things. Supposedly that's what a shark tooth represents: strength, protection. It became my talisman, my good luck charm.

I wear it all the time, but so far it hasn't worked.

Today we shoot the shit. We talk about the Lions' loss to the Giants last night, the fact that she's going to bake cookies this afternoon. We talk about the weather, we talk about the gulls.
Never heard them so loud
,
says Ingrid, and I say,
Me neither
.
But of course I have. The gulls are always loud. I think if I should mention the squatters in the yellow house across the street from mine, deciding that no, that's not the kind of small talk she wants or needs to hear. I help her unpack the sacks, laying the items on the table so that she can put them away. She hands me another twenty for my time. I try to refuse. She shoves it into my hand. I take it this time.

We go through this routine every week.

As Ingrid unpacks the sacks, she hums a song. It's not one I know, but it's a gloomy song, a morose song, one that I can't place, but it makes me feel sad. It's depressing. It makes Ingrid sad, too. Tired and sad. Her movements are plodding, her posture is slumped. “Can I help you there?” I ask, pulling the empty paper sacks from the countertop and folding them in two.

But Ingrid says, “I'm just about done,” as she sets a box of microwave popcorn on the shelf and closes the pantry door.

“Did you eat lunch, Alex?” Ingrid asks, and she offers to make me a sandwich. I lie. I said I ate. I say no thanks. The last thing I want to be is an inconvenience, or my own charity case, which I already am. It's hard to say which of us has the more miserable life, Ingrid or me.

And then, for whatever reason, when the sacks are empty and I know I can say goodbye to Ingrid and go, I pick up that deck of cards and start shuffling, anyway.

“Ever play gin rummy?” I ask, and before me, Ingrid relaxes and smiles. She's played gin rummy before. I know because I've played it with her on some other day just like today.

We sit at the table and I deal.

The first game I let her win. It seems like the right thing to do.

The second game I put up more fight, but she wins that, too. Ingrid is quite the cardsharp, drawing and discarding with nimble hands. She stares at me from above the fan of cards, trying to think through what I have in my hands. A queen of clubs, a jack of diamonds. An ace.

She's also good at meddling, though she does it with such tact it's hard to get mad.

“You're working full-time for Mrs. Priddy?” she asks as I shuffle the cards for a third time, and I say, “Yes, ma'am.” She runs her hands through her hair, relaxing the frowziness. She tugs at the robe, making sure it's tied tight. She slackens in her chair, and yet the signs of stress are still there, in the lines of her face, in the restive eyes. She rises and moves to the two-cup coffeemaker, asking if I'd like some. I say no, and she helps herself to a mug, adding the creamer, the sugar, and again I think of Pearl, of her body rising up out of the waters of Lake Michigan, dripping wet. Since yesterday, I haven't been able to get that image out of my mind.

“The rest of the kids have gone to college,” she says, as if somehow I'm in the dark about this little fact, the fact that all the kids I grew up with are no longer here. “Not for you?” she asks as I lay the cards out on the table before us. Ten for her, ten for me.

“Couldn't afford it,” is what I say, but of course that's not true. Well, it
is
true—Pops and I couldn't afford it, but we didn't need to. I was offered a full ride that I turned down. Tuition and housing included. I said thanks, but no thanks. I'm a smart kid, I know that as much as the next guy. Though not in an ostentatious, inflated kind of way, more of a sly, witty kind of way. I know big words but that doesn't mean I'm going to use them. Though some of the time I do. Sometimes they come in handy.

“How's your father?” asks Ingrid in a knowing way, and I say point-blank, “Still a drunk.”

Pops hasn't been able to hold down a job for years now. Seems you can't show up at work completely pie-eyed and plastered and plan to still get paid. After the bank nearly foreclosed on the mortgage years ago, I started working part-time for Priddy because she turned a blind eye to the fact that I was only twelve years old. I washed dishes in the back room so that no one would see, and Priddy graciously paid me under the table so the IRS wouldn't find out. It was another one of those things that everyone in town knew about, but nobody mentioned.

And then I change the subject because I no longer want to talk about my dad. Or college. Or the fact that the rest of the world has moved on, while I'm stuck in a life of stagnancy.

“Supposed to be a cold winter,” I say as the wind turns tight corners around the periphery of the house like a race car driver, brakes squealing, tires shrieking.

“Aren't they all?” asks Ingrid.

“Yup,” I say.

“Ever hear from your mom?” she asks as if she just can't quite let it go, this conversation about my father, about my mother, and I say, “Nope.” Though sometimes I do, sometimes just a random postcard from a place I'll never see: Mount Rushmore, Niagara Falls. The Alamo. Funny thing is they never say anything. She doesn't even sign her name.

“It's not easy being a mother,” she says under her breath, not looking up at me as she speaks. Ingrid is a mother, though her children are long gone, her husband gone, too, thanks to a particularly virulent strain of the flu that passed through many years ago. But Ingrid is a much better mother than my mom ever was, whether or not her kids are still around. She must've been. She looks like a mother, the considerate eyes and good-natured smile. Flaccid arms that look like they give great hugs. Not that I would know.

I consider Ingrid's words:
It's not easy being a mother.
To this I don't say anything. Not at first, anyway, but then I finally offer up, “Must be,” because the last thing I want to say is something that will exonerate my mother for leaving me. There's no excuse for that, for disappearing in the middle of the night, hopping the train out of town without ever saying goodbye. There's a photograph Pops keeps of her. In it, she's about twenty-one. They'd been together only a short time when the photograph was taken, my mother and my father. A month, two months. Hard to say. In the photo, she's not smiling. But that's not saying much. It's hard to remember my mother ever smiling. Her face is narrow, tapered at the bottom to a point. Her cheekbones are high, her nose slender. Her eyes solemn, verging on stern, maybe even mean. Her hair, brunette, cut above the shoulders, is fanned out around her head, a fallout of the generation. It's the 1980s, early 1990s. She wears a dress, which is strange because I don't ever remember seeing my mother in a dress. But in this photo she wears a pale gray and foggy lavender dress. The dress is ruffled and tiered and shifty, but it's also simple, as if trying to be something that it's not. Just like my mother.

“We all make mistakes,” she says, and I say nothing.

And then before I know it, we're talking about the dreaded winter again. The cold, the wind, the snow.

It's after the fourth game that Ingrid tells me to go. “You don't need to stay here and keep me company,” she says while gathering the playing cards in her hands. “I'm sure you have better things to do,” though of this I'm not so sure. But I go, anyway.

I bet Ingrid has better things to do than hang out with me.

I say my goodbyes and I head out the front door, letting it slam closed. From the front porch I catch the sound of the dead bolt latching. I hurtle myself down the steps and into the middle of the street as a sedan sluggishly pulls into a parking spot before me and cuts the engine. A young lady climbs out, a cigarette pinched between her thin lips. I step around the sedan and that's when I see the shadow of a lone figure ambling down the road. In a black-and-white checkered coat, a black beanie set on her head. Her canvas bag crisscrosses her slight body; her hands are shoved into the pockets of her pants. The ends of her hair blow in the wind.

Pearl.

She disappears into the morning air, over a single hill on the far end of Main Street—over the hill, getting consumed by the large homes and the enormous trees that fill that part of town, swallowed up and digested, so that before I know it, as I stand, feet frozen to concrete in the middle of the street, she's no longer there.

And then I hear the squeal of a screen door and I see Dr. Giles standing outside his cottage home, watching this scene, too.

I am not alone. Dr. Giles and I, the both of us, watch as the woman goes, watch as she evanesces over the hill and into the morning's fog.