Don't You Cry(20)

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

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

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

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

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

If your shadow is headless, you will die.

An owl sighting during the day means death is coming.

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

Death comes in threes.

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

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

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

But maybe that’s just me being overly pragmatic.





Quinn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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