Don't You Cry(80)

But she did mind.

And now, my heart beats fast as the room fades in and out before me, the rose sofa drifting away before drawing near. The windows are suddenly so close I can touch them, and then, just like that, they’re gone. My hearing is fading in and out, too, as if I’m trapped beneath water or have a bad case of swimmer’s ear. I can’t hear.

I never would have discovered that I was already dead.

The line runs over and over again in my mind. What does it mean?

I peer down at the items spread across the floor before me, and there I see Esther’s keys, the three of them, three nickel-plated brass keys on a beaded ring: a key for the main walk-up door, a key for our apartment door, a padlock key for her storage unit.

A padlock key for her storage unit.

I push myself up off the floor and, bringing Esther’s purse along with me, start to run, thinking of one thing and one thing alone: those pictures. I have to see those pictures.

*

I scurry down the streets of Chicago, past shops and restaurants, a covered bus stop, a tiny space that feigns to fight off the Chicago wind but doesn’t. Rather the wind whiffles the pages of a Chicago Tribune left behind there on the bus stop bench as I run past, all the way to the storage facility on Clark Street. The storage facility itself creeps me out—lots of doors, empty spaces, a scarcity of people. Hardly any people at all, save for a poorly paid introvert sitting behind the front desk who creeps me out, too. But I can’t let this get the best of me; I can’t let this slow me down.

Once there I use a keycard I find inside Esther’s wallet to unlock the facility doors and get inside. There’s one man on duty, a man who hovers behind a pane of glass typing words into a computer screen. He doesn’t raise his eyes to greet mine.

It’s one almond-colored roll-up door after another, all the way down a long, uninhabited corridor. The floor is some kind of polished concrete that does nothing to mask the sound of my heavy footsteps as I race down the hall, hardly able to tell one door from the next, though I’ve been here before. I rack my mind to remember which unit belongs to Esther. I insert the padlock key into three successive small disk locks but it doesn’t open a single one. I remind myself: I’ve been here before. Think, Quinn, think. Remember. Is it this almond door, or that? There must be a hundred of them, a hundred almond doors all with identical locks. A thousand of them! They all look the same to me. I transport myself in time; I try to remember the one time Esther and I were here. I retrace our steps, and follow the clues: the collection of smaller closet-size units, followed by larger ones with their garage door entrances; the security camera on the wall for which Esther and I danced. I smile at the memory—Esther and I doing an Irish jig for the man at the front desk, laughing, having a ball.

And then it comes to me: unit 203, the same address as my childhood home, the one where my mother and father still live. Fate, I remember was what Esther had called it, but I told her it was more like a stupid coincidence. I see the numbers in my mind’s eye, as I stood there last December, three feet back, watching Esther unroll the door.

I find unit 203.

I insert the key into the lock, when all of a sudden it opens. Presto! I’m in.

I roll up the heavy door and, taking one look inside, I scream. And not just any kind of scream. A desperate, falsetto scream that grabs the attention of the store clerk who comes stampeding through the locked metal door and into the storage unit fast, but not fast enough to catch me before I lose all cognizance of the world around me, plunging to the concrete floor with a whump.

My keys and phone scatter in all directions. The muscles of my bladder contract as urine creeps down the inside of my legs, soaking my tights. My ankle twists from the sheer weight of the rest of me bearing down on the joints and bones, and it’s then that I cry out in pain. My head hits the ground, bouncing up and down on the concrete like a playground ball. To that, I don’t have time to react before I’m lying prostrate on the ground, just inches from Esther, close enough to touch.

She wears her pajamas still, the comfy, cotton pajamas she wore the last time we spoke, when she sat under the warmth of a sea-foam green blanket in our living room and said to me, I’d be a killjoy, Quinn. Go without me. You’ll have more fun. That was what she’d said, and so I’d gone. I’d gone without her and I’d had fun. But now I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed. If only I would have stayed. Would I have been able to protect Esther from this fate?

My eyes take in the boxes, torn open, their possessions scattered at random all around her body. Photo albums. Journals. Esther’s baby books, the ones her mother meticulously put together when she was just a girl, photos of an infant Esther, a toddler Esther, a young Esther. The photos are now all yanked from their plastic sleeves and torn to itty-bitty shreds. Who would do such a thing?

And then there is Esther, of course, lying there before me, her body recumbent, her eyes closed tight.

Just beyond the reach of her chalky-white hand lies a single photograph of two young girls, one big and one small, and these words in black Sharpie scrawled along the upper edge of the picture: Genevieve and Esther.





Alex

The blood coagulates inside my veins, no longer delivering oxygen to my body. My legs go numb, beginning to tingle. My knees buckle, threatening to give.

“You don’t look so good, Alex,” she says, holding the knife in her hands, a shiny knife, over a foot of sturdy steel with an ultrasharp edge. A chef’s blade plucked from Ingrid’s kitchen set. She leads Ingrid and me to the living room and forces us to sit down. My footsteps are loud as I cross the room, the booming sound of gunfire at a firing range, exploding at one hundred and fifty decibels or more. A cork blasting from the neck of a bottle of champagne. A sonic boom. Thunder. The heavy pelting of rain on a car’s steel hood, hollow and persistent and loud.