Don't You Cry(87)

But now I see: not my Esther. No. Esther would never do anything to hurt me.

Only now do I know it’s true.

“What do you mean?” she asks, her voice nearly a whisper. She’s all but lost her voice. She holds a hand to her throat; it hurts. “You’re a good roommate, Quinn, you are. You found me,” she breathes, “you saved me,” and at that word saved she begins to cough.

“We don’t have to talk right now,” I say to her. “You should rest,” but as I turn to go, she reaches for my hand.

“Don’t go,” she says, and I take a deep breath and admit to the things I’ve done, how I riffled through her bedroom once, twice, three times, how I found things I know she never wanted me to see. I don’t have to tell her what I found; she knows. She nods knowingly and I voice a name: Jane Girard. Esther’s new name. I also confess that she got a phone call from a woman named Meg, a woman replying to her ad in the Reader, a woman who wanted to be her roommate instead of me. I try not to be sensitive; Esther has been through enough. And yet it hurts when I tell her this, when I admit to knowing she wanted to replace me with another roommate.

“Oh, Quinn,” she says, and with whatever strength she has, she squeezes my hand. “The roommate was for you,” she says, five words that leave me utterly confused. “I was the one who was going to leave.”

And then she explains.

When Esther was a little girl, only a year or so old, her sister drowned. She died. Esther didn’t know a thing about her sister, though there were photos that she’d seen, and also a story that was imparted to her over the years: they were in a hotel room, Esther, her mother and sister, Genevieve, and when Genevieve was left alone in the bathroom for a minute or two, she sunk under the bathwater and died. The reason she was left alone in the room? Esther. That’s the story she was told, though her mother always finished with this addendum: It’s not your fault, Esther. You were only a baby. You couldn’t have known.

And yet Esther grew up believing it was her fault. She also grew up feeling like a piece of her was missing. Because of her, her sister was dead. The grief was hard to handle; she sought help, a psychologist in the city, the one whose business card I found: Thomas Nutting. He helped, but only ever a little bit, never enough. And the grief, it came and it went time and again, weighing Esther down. She couldn’t breathe. Until the day her mother admitted to her that Genevieve was never really dead. “She’d lied to me,” Esther says. “She lied to everyone. I could never forgive her for what she’d done.”

And Esther, who does everything one hundred and ten percent, decided to find Genevieve, and she did. She tells me she found her, about a year and a half ago. She located her on an adoption site online, and the two of them made plans to meet. What Esther imagined was a happy family reunion. She was filled with glee.

Instead, the reunion was suffused with blackmail and threats. Genevieve planned to expose their mother for what she’d done: the adoption, the cover-up, the abandonment. She started stalking her, calling her phone over and over and over again, though twice Esther had her number changed. Genevieve kept finding her. She showed up at her apartment door; she sent her letters. But Esther wouldn’t let it happen; she couldn’t be a part of exposing their mother no matter how upset she was. Genevieve said she wanted to be a happy little family, but Esther knew that could never be. And so Esther planned to disappear. She changed her name; she got a passport. She wanted to leave and begin somewhere new, a fresh start without her mother and Genevieve.

“I couldn’t just abandon you like that,” she says to me. “I didn’t want to leave you alone. The roommate,” she explains, “was for you.”

Esther was interviewing roommates to find the perfect one for me.

She wanted to make sure I was okay before she could leave. Now that sounds like something Esther would do.

“But then Genevieve began sending letters.” They were harmless at first, she says, but always odd. Most of them she threw away, not really thinking Genevieve had it in her to make good on the threats. Genevieve was screwed up, that much she knew, but she was sure she was simply an annoyance. Harmless. Until the letter came where she admitted to having killed Kelsey.

“Kelsey,” Esther says, and with this begins to cry. It was her fault, she believed, that Kelsey was dead. Dead by association. Kelsey hadn’t done a single thing wrong. “That’s when I knew I had to go to the police. This was out of my control. It had gone too far.” And she admits to me that maybe her mother wasn’t wrong, after all. Maybe she was right to get rid of Genevieve.

Saturday night, the night the last note arrived, she contacted Mrs. Budny to have the locks on our apartment door changed so that Genevieve couldn’t let herself inside and do something to harm me, too. Esther was trying to protect me. She called Detective Davies and told him they needed to meet; she had something to show him. The note.

And it’s in that moment that everything makes perfect sense.

That night after Esther locked the doors and climbed into bed, Genevieve rang the buzzer over and over and over again, and when Esther refused to answer, she appeared at her bedroom window and towed her away. “Either you come,” she told Esther as she dragged her down the fire escape, or she would hurt me, too. She had a photograph to prove it: me walking down a city street in my purple sweater, one Genevieve slipped into the paper shredder before they left. She’d been following me. Esther was trying to protect me.