Don't You Cry(30)

I ravage the freezer for something to eat, settling on a frozen pizza jam-packed with pork fat and mechanically separated chicken beef. I’m not known for my healthy eating habits, but rather one who likes to indulge on fatty, greasy things—and ice cream. It’s an act of rebellion, naturally, a way to get back at my mother for years and years worth of Shake ’n Bake chicken, Hamburger Helper casserole and the unvarying mound of mixed frozen vegetables (lukewarm): the peas, the corn, the cut green beans. She’d always make me sit at the table until I’d finished my meal. Didn’t matter if I was eight or eighteen.

The first thing I did upon moving in with Esther: splurge at the grocery store on everything my mother never wanted me to eat. I asserted my independence; I took control. I claimed a kitchen cabinet and a freezer shelf as my own in Esther’s and my passé kitchen, loading them with potato chips and Oreo cookies, enough frozen pizzas to feed a football team.

Until, of course, Esther helped me see the error of my ways.

Esther is a good cook, the very best, the kind who can make things like cauliflower and asparagus taste good, or even better than good. She makes them taste delicious. She searches for recipes online; she follows cooking blogs. But me? I don’t cook. And Esther isn’t here to do it for me. So I find a baking sheet and slather it with cooking spray.

As my pizza cooks I wander into Esther’s bedroom. It’s dark as I go in, and so I flip on a table lamp that sits on the edge of her desk. The room comes to life, and there it is again, that fish—the Dalmatian Molly—pleading with me for food. I see it in its beady black eyes: Feed me. I sprinkle in a small handful of flakes and start pulling at desk and dresser drawers at random. While yesterday’s search was a simple reconnaissance mission, this one is the real deal. A strip search. A no-holds-barred search. It’s more intelligence gathering than a fishing expedition (no pun intended).

And as I pull and pluck papers at random from inside the drawers, I realize the fish and I have a little something in common: Esther has abandoned the both of us. She’s cast us aside and left us both for dead.

What I find is doodles. Restaurant menus. An essay on adaptive response, and another on dyspraxia. Jottings on kinesthesia with words like hand-eye coordination and body awareness inscribed on the lines of the notebook paper in Esther’s script. A greeting card from her great-aunt Lucille. The lyrics for a church hymn. Post-it notes with reminders like Pick up dry cleaning and Get milk. An arbitrary phone number. A box of contacts, colored contacts, that makes me stop dead in my tracks.

I stop and inspect the packaging. They’re blue, brilliant blue, as the box says. And I picture Esther’s cherubic face, one brown eye and one blue, a physical mark that proved she was special. Chosen.

Does that mean...? I wonder, and Could it be...?

Is Esther’s one blue eye an imposter?

No, I tell myself. No. It can’t be.

But maybe.

But there are other things I find, too. Things that leave me equally as confused. Handouts on grieving, the grieving process, the seven stages of grief. I try to convince myself that this has something to do with her getting her occupational therapy degree—if Esther was sad, wouldn’t I have known?—and that this isn’t real life. Not Esther’s life, anyway. Someone else’s life. But that belief only lasts so long. From the piles of paper a card falls to my lap, a monochromatic card with a monogram on the front, a name, address and phone number on the rear. It’s a business card for a doctor. Licensed Psychologist, it reads. I pick up that card and stare at it for a good three minutes, making sure it doesn’t read podiatrist, pulmonologist, pediatrician. Some other kind of doctor that starts with a p. But no. It says psychologist. Esther was sad. Esther is sad. She’s grieving, and I didn’t know a thing about it.

But why, I wonder, why is Esther sad?

And what else hasn’t she been telling me?

There’s more. Another document that I find in the pile of documents. A form, an official-looking form that reads State of Illinois across the top. In the circuit court of Cook County. Petition for name change.

It’s complete. Signed, dated and stamped. Esther is no longer Esther, but now Jane? It seems preposterous, imagining Esther as something as banal as a Jane. Something so ordinary for Esther, who isn’t in the least bit ordinary. If she had to change her name she should have gone for something along the lines of Portia, Cordelia, Astrid. That’s far more suiting to Esther than Jane.

But no. Esther is now Jane. Jane Girard.

I’m hit with a sudden flash from the past: Esther and I sitting on the apartment sofa, watching TV. It was three months ago, maybe four. She’d been somewhere for the day, which she was pretty tight-lipped and buttoned-up about; she wouldn’t tell me where she’d gone. And since she didn’t, my mind made up for lack of details, envisioning some unscrupulous man with a wife and kids meeting Esther at that shady hotel over on Ridge, the one that was still offering en suite bathrooms and color TV, as if this was the latest and greatest in hotel accommodations. It wasn’t like Esther to do such a thing, but it was fun in my mind to pretend. She didn’t want to talk about where she’d been, and muttered one-word responses to every darn question I asked: Yes and No and Fine.

She said two weird things then, two weird things that I remember. First, she said, “Have you ever tried to make something better, and ended up making everything worse?” Though when I asked her to explain, she wouldn’t elaborate. I told her yes. Story of my life, was what I said.