Don't You Cry(55)

Or maybe just someone who is sad.

I nod my head and say yes, I know that, though sometimes I’m not so sure if it’s true. Good or not good, I still feel like a deadbeat. It’s that thought that haunts me in the middle of the night: the fact that this is the be-all and end-all of life for me. This is it, life as I know it. That there will never be anything other than this. This town, this existence, Priddy’s café. A lifetime of cleaning up someone else’s dirty dishes. I hear the girl from my dreams calling to me, Let’s go...

Will I ever get the chance to go?

“Your mother,” she says, allowing her voice to drift off before finding the guts to finish the thought, to say what she’s thinking out loud. “She should have known better than to leave.” And then she pats me on the arm as I turn to go, carrying with me a container of leftover pasta.

As I walk, off in the distance a coyote howls as the train rattles through town, a freight train this time, too late for the commuter train to be coming through. But it did pass through, hours ago, that commuter train. I wonder if Pearl climbed on board or whether she is still here, patrolling the streets of town.

It’s well after nine o’clock and the town is in a deep sleep, hibernating as we do until spring.

When I get home Pops is sound asleep on the sofa, facedown. Beside his overturned beer is another Final Notice, moist with the fermenting scent of alcohol. It clings to the table, threatening to tear as I lift it up and curse out loud. “Damn it, Pops.” The electricity this time. Soon we will be without lights. My eyes skim past the TV, past the lamp, past an ugly, old flush-mount light on the living room ceiling, and to the open refrigerator door—all on, all being used. He’s managed to leave them all on, amassing more charges on the bill. I’m going to have to work overtime to pay the bill, more time busting my ass for Priddy while Pops sits at home getting trashed. And the money he gets for the beer. Now there’s the real kicker. Pops doesn’t have his own money for beer. He smashed my piggy bank once upon a time, long ago, when I was just a boy. He’s been known to find and forge my paychecks from Priddy, and has asked at the bank for them to be cashed. Then he started sneaking into my bedroom and stealing my things—old baseball trophies, my high school class ring—stuff he could sell at the thrift store in town. Now I keep him on a small allowance so that he’ll leave my things be. But still, he doesn’t leave them be. Just last week I discovered my telescope missing, another treasure sold for booze.

But these are just things to me. Material things. What matters most to me isn’t worth more than a few bucks, but I keep it tucked away under my bed to be sure Pops never finds it. My collection of crinoid stems. Indian beads gathered from the seashore. Tiny fossilized creatures collected in a Ziploc bag. Pops can have the telescope if he needs it that badly, but the crinoid stems are mine.

As expected, a single stove burner has been left on, the house filling quickly with a kerosene-like smell. A grilled cheese—completely blackened—lies forgotten on the stove, burning on a frying pan while Pops sleeps and snores, runnels of drool trickling down his chin and onto a slothful hand. The butter has been left out of the refrigerator, on the countertop beside the pack of American cheese. Both look a little bit gamy to me; I toss them in the trash. The fridge door is wide open, the food inside drifting to lukewarm. There’s a spilled beer on the floor, the brew seeping into the tiles of our kitchen floor, warping them before my eyes.

I try to shake him awake and get him to clean his own goddamn mess. He doesn’t budge. I press my ear to his chest to be sure; he’s still breathing. He better be.

This way I can kill him when he finally does wake up.

He could have burned the whole house down.

I open the windows to air out the stench and put myself to work cleaning up the mess—Pops’s mess—again, my anger mitigated only by the fact that my stomach is full.

Tonight I’ve been fed and cared for by a mother, any mother, whether or not that mother is mine.





Quinn

It’s dark by the time I leave the apartment of Nicholas Keller. It’s darker than dark. It’s pitch-black, a starless November night, the sky an inky black.

I hop on the 55 bus in Hyde Park, a good six or seven miles south of the Loop. My home, at least nine miles north of the Loop, feels far away. In another world entirely, on another planet, in another galaxy, and though I want to be there, I wonder if my home will ever again feel like home.

The commute to my apartment is inauspicious even before it begins, over an hour long, retracing the steps I made on the way to the Hyde Park flat less than an hour ago as the sun was just starting its drop in the cold night sky. Two buses, an “L” ride and a half-mile walk on foot.

But that was before. Before I had confirmation from Nicholas Keller that Esther killed his fiancé, a woman now buried beneath a bronze grave marker in an idyllic cemetery in the suburbs of Boston.

What I don’t get is what all these weird occurrences have in common: Esther’s disappearance, the hunt for a new roommate, the petition to change her name, the death of Kelsey Bellamy.

There’s one thought I can’t get out of my mind. Is Esther on the hunt for a new roommate because she also wants me dead?

Is Esther trying to kill me?

A shiver runs down my spine, and I imagine spiders scaling my vertebrae like a flight of stairs, thousands of spiders climbing the skin, their long segmented legs stealing their way across, claws digging in. Spinning webs beneath my shirt.