Don't You Cry(40)

My mother never told me why she didn’t want me to touch her. It was simply, Don’t touch me.

“You could have said hi,” Pearl tells me then, drawing me away from the memories of my mother. Her eyes run this time from down to up, taking in my black gym shoes, my cheap pleated work pants and uniform shirt and bow tie, and I think, What do I say to this? All logic would have me ask why she was swimming in the bitter cold lake in the middle of November. Why she didn’t have a bathing suit, a beach towel? Doesn’t she know about hypothermia and freezing to death? Frostbite?

But that would be lame.

“Do you have a name?” I ask instead, trying hard to play it cool, and she says, without ever once looking at me, “I do.”

And then I wait, on the edge of my proverbial seat, for her to tell me what it is. I wait so long that I start to form ideas in my head: Mallory, Jennifer, Amanda.

But then her food arrives—Red elbowing me out of the way to get through with the hot plate—and just like that she starts to eat, staring out the spotted window at pedestrians on the street, completely incognizant of the sun in her eyes or me, lingering a half step behind her, waiting for a name.

She has a name.

But she doesn’t tell me what it is.





Quinn

At work I find that I can concentrate on nothing but Esther. Little does she know it, but she occupies every spare moment of my time. My phone rings and the first thought on my mind is Esther. Is it Esther? But it’s not Esther. I hear my name called over the PA system, beckoning me to reception, where I run quickly down the gleaming hardwood floors of the law firm, certain it’s Esther, that she’s there at the receptionist’s desk, waiting for me, but instead I see a bombastic attorney sending me to deliver documents to the office of some expert witness to be analyzed. I scurry quickly off on my task, my mind still consumed with Esther, feeling hurt and worried all at the same time. It comes to me in random moments, this fact that Esther is trying to get rid of me, a betrayal that is sometimes overshadowed for this unmistakable feeling that something is wrong, that something has happened to her.

The minute I return to the law firm from my errand, I seek out Ben and come to learn that he’s at a stalemate in his search, as well. Though he’s made attempts to track down a Mr. or Mrs. Vaughan, his search turned up empty. Ben is seated at his own office cube when I come in from behind, startling him in his swivel chair. He rubs at his head and sighs, losing hope like me. On the computer screen before him are three tormenting words: no records found.

“No word from Esther?” he asks.

I shake my head and say, “No word.”

I am not the only one who finds it impossible to focus on the tedium and stupidity of work. I couldn’t care less right now about things such as Bates labels and document productions and what kind of deadline some deranged attorney needs me to photocopy thousands of documents by. It all seems so frivolous and petty when Esther is missing.

I’m not the only one feeling frustrated by this strange turn of events. Ben feels it, too, and there in his cheerless cube we lament on how impossible it is to focus on work when work is the farthest thing from our minds. We make a pact to leave and by two-fifteen we both phony up an illness at work: food poisoning. We grope our midsections and claim to have eaten something rotten, putrid, rank. The roast beef, I say, and Ben blames his chopped chicken salad. We threaten to vomit, and it’s immediate, almost, the way we’re told to go home. Just go.

And so we do.

We share a cab, my treat because Ben is trekking out to my apartment in Andersonville to help me sort this mystery out. He offers to split the fare with me—of course he does, my very own knight in shining armor (he just doesn’t know it yet)—but I say no. The cabbie hurls us through the streets of Chicago, tossing us this way and that on the torn leather seat. He leaves the Loop and hops on Lake Shore Drive, exiting at Foster. I watch Lake Michigan out the filthy car window as we pass, the water blue, as is the sky, but that doesn’t mean either of them are the slightest bit warm. It’s a clear day, the kind of day where they say you can see all the way to Michigan from the top of the Willis Tower. I don’t know what you can see, just the other side of the lake pouring onto the shores of some negligible town, I suppose. Outside it’s cold, the wind pitiless, and though I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with our tempestuous weather, the nickname Windy City feels entirely apropos.

The cabbie reaches a good sixty miles per hour on Lake Shore Drive and though we’re both scared as all get-out, in the backseat Ben and I laugh. It feels wrong to laugh. Almost. Esther could be in real danger. But there’s also a bit of desperation in it, a bit of agony and misery. It isn’t a lighthearted laugh.

I’m concerned about Esther, of course, and yet there’s a part of me still put off by Esther’s whole lavish plot to replace me. So many of the clues point to Esther: Esther wrote the creepy notes to My Dearest; Esther placed the ad in the Reader; Esther changed her own name; Esther had a passport photo taken; Esther requested the locks be changed on our apartment door. Esther, Esther, Esther.

So why should I be worried for Esther when this is all her doing?

Also, if I don’t laugh, I might just go berserk.

As we emerge from the cab on my little residential block of Farragut Avenue, the wind whips through my hair, dragging it some way other than the way which my feet need to go. It’s with instinct that I grab for Ben’s arm and he steadies me before I release my hold and let go.