Don't You Cry(48)

But Esther didn’t give up. She dragged me out of bed day after day after day, though each day I tried hard to refuse, blaming blisters on my feet, the aches and pains near the joints and muscles and tendons. It hurt everywhere. I could hardly squat down to use the restroom or pull on a pair of socks or my shoes. But Esther didn’t give up on me. Wakey, wakey, she sang to me each day, luring me from bed. She drew a warm bath for my aching limbs, adding Epsom salt—the panacea for muscle pain, as Esther claimed. She made me stretch. She helped with my socks. She tied my shoes. She yanked me out to the Lakefront Trail.

And I ran.

This is what I realize as I return to my bedroom closet, sitting there staring at that word carved into the drywall—Kelsey—like some sort of desperate cry for help. When Esther puts her mind to something, there isn’t a thing she can’t do.

But I can’t help but wonder what it is this time that Esther’s put her mind to.

In time Ben and I move into Esther’s bedroom, where I show him my latest work-in-progress, the ribbons of photo paper spread across the floor.

“What’s this?” he asks as I explain how I pulled these scraps from Esther’s paper shredder.

“Maybe nothing,” I say, “or maybe something.” I shrug, admitting, “I don’t know yet,” and without being asked Ben and I drop to the floor in tandem and make haste of putting my shredded puzzle pieces together, more curious than ever to know who it’s a photograph of.

We work quickly; we don’t speak. We don’t need to speak. Is it Esther in the image, or maybe, just maybe, it’s Kelsey Bellamy. Together we start to engineer the brick of a building, a slab of concrete, and somewhere in the center an image begins to form of a woman: mere legs, thinner than a man’s would be, sporting a pair of flare jeans. She has no face yet, nothing to tell us who she is, no telling accessories that stand out in the half-formed image. It’s a zoomed-out photograph, not a close-up, and so the details are hard to see as Ben and I stay up well past our bedtimes toiling away on the task.

Outside there’s a full moon, a golden globe that glares through the window, splashing its light on the floor. As the clouds roll by, they snatch with them the moonlight, and the room grows darker, the puzzle pieces lying before Ben and me harder to see.

But then the moon returns again, taunting and mocking us, its light bursting across the floor, and I have to wonder if a nefarious Esther is out there somewhere taunting and mocking us, too.





           WEDNESDAY





Alex

I wake up earlier than usual and bike to the only twenty-four-hour grocery store in town. There’s hardly a scrap of food in Pops’s and my refrigerator, and what’s there is likely expired or is growing green with mold. It’s a three-mile trip in either direction, and so I bike there and cart home a dozen eggs, a carton of milk, shredded cheese and fruit in a plastic sack that dangles from the bike’s handlebars. There’s not much fresh fruit in season this time of year, but I get a couple of apples and a bunch of red grapes. It’ll have to do.

Back in Pops’s and my kitchen, I start washing the fruit and scrambling the eggs. I add the milk and cheese to the eggs, the way Pops likes them, and some salt and pepper, too. The house begins to fill with a smell of homemade food, but even that doesn’t wake Pops, sound asleep, the door to his bedroom pulled to. I sift through our dishes to find a plate that isn’t cracked or chipped, and begin placing the prepared food here and there, a mound of eggs, a handful of grapes. When I’m through, the plate looks vacant still—empty and sad, a bit pathetic—and I know that I should have gotten more: toast, a bagel, sausage links. Something along those lines, but I didn’t. Oh, well. I pour a glass of milk, and then second-guess it all and think that I should have gotten juice. Or coffee. Or cereal. On a whim I snatch a Mountain Dew from the fridge, just in case. You never know what it is that she likes to drink with her eggs.

And then I load it into my arms, head out the front door and cross the street. I also leave Pops a plate.

She’s still asleep when I come in, but the sound of my footsteps draws her from sleep. That or the smell of eggs. She sits up slowly in her makeshift bed as only an old lady would do, the stretching of body parts—arms and legs and such—as if it hurts, the bones and muscles being thrust back into place, the reviving of limbs that have gone senseless and numb.

“Good morning,” I say, maybe too spiritedly, and she says to me, “Good morning.”

Her words are gruff, her voice still sluggish and dopey, but I smile, anyway.

I’m just glad that she’s still here.

I thought about it half the night, about the fruit and the eggs and whether or not I’d find the house abandoned when I returned come morning. I considered the possibility that she’d be out, wandering the streets of town, or that maybe she’d have boarded the Pere Marquette and headed far away from here. But here she is, in the flesh, her hair a jumble of bedhead, creases on her pale skin. She wears my sweatshirt still, the hood pulled up over her head. The minute I arrive she attempts to shimmy out of it—as if that’s the reason I came—but I say to her, “No. Keep it,” and so she does. I’ve showered and dressed and have on a new sweatshirt today, same beat-up cotton, another shade of gray.