Don't You Cry(33)

All of that makes perfect sense.

What makes no sense to me is why I follow him.





My Dearest, I’ve forgotten many things. But there are many more I will always remember: your voice, your smile, your eyes. The way you smelled, what it felt like when your hands first touched mine.

I didn’t ask for you. You should have just gone away like I asked you to. Like I told you to. Just go. But you didn’t go, and then you were there, and there was nothing I could do.

You stayed until it was me who had to go.

I wonder, sometimes, if you even remember me.

Do you remember me?

All my love,





EV





Quinn

There are few worthwhile lessons I actually remember my mother teaching me. Don’t pick your pimples, they’ll scar. And Floss your teeth. You don’t want to lose your teeth before you turn thirty-five. That’s what she said, citing cavities and gingivitis as the cause of tooth loss. There was also the fact of bad breath, and how bad breath scared eligible bachelors away, and I didn’t want to be a spinster forever, did I? That’s what Mom asked those nights she hovered in the doorway to the bathroom in our split-level suburban home, insisting that I floss my teeth. I was about twelve years old and already she was picturing me as an old spinster living alone with a thousand cats.

But there was one lesson that stood out above the rest. One good one. I was fifteen. I’d gotten into a fight with my best friend, Carrie, of eleven years over something as inane as a boy. I had my heart set on asking some football jock to the high school’s turnabout dance, but she asked him before I had the chance. You snooze, you lose, Carrie had said to me, and it was in that moment I decided we’d no longer be friends. What I wanted to do was scream at her, berate her in public, start some hideous catfight in the crowded halls of our public high school, pulling hair and arousing our retractable feline claws so we could scratch each other’s eyes out while scores of teenagers watched, picking sides and jeering us on.

But my mother wisely cautioned that this would help nothing. She was right. Carrie was bigger than me, for one. She was tall, an athlete, a basketball and volleyball player to boot. She could kick my ass if given the chance, and so I didn’t dare give her the chance.

Instead, my mother suggested I write notes to my friend-turned-archenemy, Carrie. “Jot your feelings down on paper. Tell her how you’re feeling,” she said, with the PS: “Don’t send the letters. Don’t give them to her. Keep them to yourself. But once you get your feelings down on paper, you’ll be able to move on. You’ll be able to think through your emotions. You’ll find closure.”

And she was right. I wrote the letters, long scolding notes on lined purple notebook paper with my favorite gel pen. And in those letters I read Carrie the riot act. I tore into her, I took her into the woodshed and reamed her out. I called her names. I told her I hated her. I said I wished she’d die.

But I never gave the letters to Carrie. I wrote them and threw them away. And in the end, I felt better. I found my closure. And I found new friends, too, though never any as dear as Carrie had once been.

Until the day I met Esther.

Sitting there that day on Esther’s bedroom floor, eating my pizza, mozzarella cheese streaming down my chin, I’m absolutely certain of one thing: that’s why Esther was writing the notes to My Dearest. That was her intent, to get her emotions down on paper, to feel better, to find closure with this two-timing man who has broken her heart.

The notes were never meant to be seen.

After searching a few more drawers, a shoebox or two in Esther’s raggedy closet and under the bed, I give up. I’m not going to find any more answers in here, anything other than the contacts, the information on loss and grieving, the passport photo, the change-of-name form, all things which raise far more questions than they solve—namely, who is Esther, really?

I’m feeling frustrated to say the least. Assumptions come to mind: Esther, aka Jane, has taken her passport and fled the country; or maybe Esther, aka Jane, is sitting somewhere, so afflicted by grief she can’t bring herself to come home. I just don’t know, but it makes me sad, thinking that Esther is sad and I didn’t know. And so I find that business card and dial the number embossed on its surface, the one for the psychologist. It rings five times, but he doesn’t answer, sending the call to voice mail, whereby I leave a message delineating my concerns. My roommate Esther Vaughan is gone, I tell him, and I explain that I found his card in her things. I ask if maybe he knows where she is. I beg, in fact, hoping, wondering, if Esther might have revealed to him some place she likes to go to hide, or whether or not she planned to leave the country without her phone. Maybe she told him the reasons she decided to place an ad for another roommate in the Reader, or why she wants to replace me with Meg from Portage Park. Perhaps he knows. Perhaps Esther sat there in some dimly lit room across from the man and confessed to him that I made for a lousy roommate. That I didn’t pay my fair share of the rent, that I didn’t cook. That I ate her dill weed. And maybe he encouraged her, as a good psychologist would do, to cut ties and to do it quickly. To kick me to the curb. To be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, in case my abuse went beyond the realm of shiftless and slovenly. To not let me take advantage of her anymore.

Perhaps it’s his fault I’m in this predicament.