Don't You Cry(71)

She starts to walk. She doesn’t see me as I follow her by twenty paces or more, as we drift down the street and into town, heading in the direction of the old cemetery, again. I am on tiptoes, trying hard to silence my footsteps. Pearl, herself, walks as if on air.

I watch breathlessly as Pearl lets herself in through the strident iron gate, walking across a carpet of fallen leaves. I follow. It’s still early morning, the sun having yet to subdue the heavy fog that impregnates the land, turning the air to clouds. We walk through clouds all along the way, Pearl in the front, me in the rear, watching as the world materializes before us in ten-foot increments so that we’re utterly clueless as to what exists beyond those visible ten feet. I am, at least. I have no idea what’s there or what’s not there as if I’m Christopher Columbus half certain that in those ten feet I might fall off the face of the flat earth and die. Black turns to gray—the bark of the trees, the iron of the gate getting washed away by the fog. Everything is pale and bleached. Tree branches and age-old gravestones become intangible, evanescing at their edges. Before my eyes, they disappear, too, lost in the brume. Streetlamps are on, their light fading fast in ten-foot intervals as do the trees and the fence and the gravestones I falter past one by one by one, tripping over rocks and roots all along the way to Genevieve’s resting spot, her grave.

Pearl has no idea that I’m here.

As I hover in the distance, completely blanketed by the thick fog and the branches of dense shrubbery, I see her take a gardening spade to the earth and start to dig.





Quinn

Outside the day is cold. It’s sunny, but that doesn’t mean much. The sun reflects off the glass of the buildings, subduing me. Slowing me down. It’s in my eyes so that I can’t see, and I need to see as I scurry through the masses of people, looking forward, looking backward, hurrying on my way to Millennium Park. I turn around quickly, making sure I’m not being trailed.

The temperatures stick around in the midforties as, up and down Michigan Avenue, workers hang holiday lights on the buildings and trees. It’s too early for this, only November, and yet within days Mickey and Minnie will arrive to lead the parade, the Magnificent Mile Lights Festival, which Esther and I went to together last year.

But this year we won’t be going.

I consider the red line singed across my neck in the shredded photograph and think, This year I might be dead.

The streets are busy. Sandwiched somewhere in between the morning rush and the noon hour, the streets are still congested with people, hordes of them standing at various intersections, waiting for their turn to cross. Cabs soar by, much too quickly for the allotted speed of thirty. I stand at the intersection, waiting for the light to turn green. I watch as a cabbie slams on the brakes, startling a woman in the center of the street. She drops her yoga mat and flips him off, but he breezes past her, anyway, uncaring.

And then I scurry on to Millennium Park.

Millennium Park is a ginormous park right in the heart of the Loop, complete with a garden and band shell, an ice rink, a fountain with reflecting pool and, of course, the legendary Bean. It has a name, one I can’t think of right now as I hurry right past it, but for most of us Chicagoans it’s aptly known as the Bean. It looks like a bean. If it talks like a bean and walks like a bean, then it is probably a bean.

Tons of people gather at Millennium Park each day, locals and tourists alike. It’s a hotspot. Kids kick around in the reflecting pool, being spat at by the faces of Crown Fountain. They lie on their backsides beneath the Bean to see their warped reflections in the steel plates like a fun-house mirror. They dine in outdoor cafés; they listen to live music on the lawn of the pavilion, catching some rays under the warm, summer sun. They follow paths and bridges through the gardens and eat ice cream beneath the tall trees.

But not today.

Today it’s too cold.

I didn’t think of this when considering a nice, public place to meet the detective.

I’m early. While I wait for the detective to show, I try to hide among the stripped November trees, but they’re transparent, see-through. They offer no disguise. Tourists with a camera pass by and ask that I take their picture. I back away. I say that I’m in a hurry. I can’t be slowed down.

I make the decision to steal away into a local coffee shop to kill some time. I order a latte and take a seat in back. There is a newspaper on the table that someone must have left behind, and I hold it to my face so I won’t be seen. I think about the photograph scattered in a million pieces on Esther’s bedroom floor. It’s a threat, a blatant threat. She wants to take my life. Esther took that photograph and then marked it up with a red pen, a thin line across my neck—a telling sign she wants me dead.

I sip my latte, my hands shaking so badly it’s no wonder it spills. I avoid eye contact. I check my phone three times: Where is Ben?

When the time comes, I hasten out to meet the detective right where we said we’d meet: on the west side of Crown Fountain. There are wooden benches there that frame the periphery of the fountains and pool. When I arrive, the detective is already there. I know it’s him because, well, because he looks like a cop: big and stocky and grim. My guess is that he’d be a drag at holiday dinner parties but that’s neither here nor there. He doesn’t wear a coat, as if completely unaffected by the autumn air that all but immobilizes me. His shirt is a button-down and he’s wearing black jeans. Do people still wear black jeans? I wonder as I stride around the reflecting pool and take aim on Detective Robert Davies. Apparently they do.