A thousand thoughts run amuck in my mind, but at the very core of them is one question that comes to me again and again: Why? Why did Esther place an ad in the Reader, why is she looking for a new roommate, why does she want to do away with me? I’m hurt. My feelings are hurt like I’ve been stabbed in the back with Romeo’s dagger. I get it that I’m a slob and I pay a measly forty-five percent of the rent rather than the afore-agreed-to fifty, that I don’t always have the cash to cover my share of the utilities or that I leave lights on and forget to turn off the sink water. But still, Esther, I snap silently in my head, wondering suddenly who is the lousier roommate: Esther or me. How could you do this to me? Where did she possibly think I would go if she kicked me out? Back home to suburban America to live with my mother and father and Madison the dweeb? No way. Esther could have pointed out my deficiencies for me; we could have had a conversation about it. She could have given me some warning before deciding to kick me out. Some time to find a new apartment, a new roommate. My heart sinks. I thought Esther was my friend, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe Esther was just my roommate all along.
“It’s okay if you did. I mean, it’s not a big deal,” says the caller, but I clear my throat and swallow the overwhelming sense of betrayal and say to her, “No. I didn’t. I’m so glad you called,” and it’s then that I make arrangements to meet the young lady who’s about to be my replacement, who’s to take over my spot at the kitchen table, my place on the rose-colored sofa, the one who will soon inhabit my room, and become best friends with my best friend while I get tossed like leftover food.
I think of myself, all alone in the big city, without Esther. I can’t afford the rent in a city apartment on my own if my life depends on it. Eleven hundred dollars a month this unit costs, which in Chicago is quite the steal. Esther has lived in this apartment for years, the reason it was cheaper than all its other walk-up counterparts in the neighborhood: rent control. If I walked into Mrs. Budny’s office today and told her I wanted my own apartment, identical to the one I share with Esther, she’d charge me sixteen hundred bucks a month and I don’t have anything in the realm of that kind of money.
I agree to meet with my replacement after work tomorrow at a small coffee shop on Clark. We say our goodbyes and I pull up the Reader online, and sure enough, there it is, the ad. Female in need of roommate to share 2BDR Andersonville apartment. Great locale. Call Esther, and there she leaves her cell phone number beside a photograph of our walk-up from the outside, the autumn leaves tumbling from the trees as if she’d taken that photo yesterday or maybe just the day before.
Why, Esther? I silently beg. Why?
MONDAY
Alex
I rise early, well before the sun, and head out into the cold morning air for the long haul to town to retrieve Ingrid’s groceries for her as promised. The air is nippy today, making it hard to breathe. It burns my lungs, freezes my hands and ears as I close and lock the door behind myself, shutting a dozing Pops inside. In my hand I carry bills to discard in the mailbox outside. I used last week’s paycheck to cover them, the gas bill coming with a Final Notice that we’d soon be without heat. Its arrival a week ago yesterday prompted a scolding of Pops about how he’d better get his shit together and find a job.
I’m glad to see he took it to heart.
As I make my way to the mailbox, I eyeball that old, abandoned home across the street, searching for potential squatters or other signs of life. It’s an ugly sight, it is, one of the few scars on our otherwise tolerable street. There are vacant houses, properties foreclosed on, new homes stymied in the midst of construction, plywood and two-by-fours and other building supplies still taking up residence on the weedy lawns. It’s a sign of the times, the housing crisis of our generation that other generations will read about in history textbooks to come. I’m kind of stoked about it in some weird way, knowing these abandoned, beaten-up, unloved homes are making history as we speak.
The people in the neighborhood are mostly blue-collar workers, many commuting from as far as Portage, Indiana, or Hobart, to earn a paycheck and pay their bills. They work mainly in the manufacturing industry, if they’re not working retail for some shop in town. Money is harder to come by here than it is for others, and yet we’re better off than those in the slummy apartments off Emery Road, the subsidized housing units, low-income apartments paid for in part by the US government.
But regardless of how many scourged homes there are on the block or in town, this is the house everyone always talks about: that school-bus-yellow, minimal traditional home with its aluminum siding and its busted roof, right across the street from mine.
That house wasn’t always a blot on the landscape. Though I’ve never seen it as anything but a blight with my own two eyes, I’ve heard this from neighbors who stand on their front lawns from time to time, arms crossed, frowning at what it’s become over the years. It wasn’t always such an eyesore, they tell me. A damn shame, they say. There was a time when the house was actually lived in and nice. Neighbors want it demolished, but the bank that owns the property doesn’t want to pay for that. That costs money. And so they leave it be. The house is a pockmark now, though it’s always been this way, since I was a little thing myself. Like the rest of the world I wish someone would level it to the ground and take it out of its misery.
And then of course there are the stories of the ghost of Genevieve.
Kids (gutsy, stupid or otherwise) have been known to creep to the windows and peer in, spying her wraith through the panes of glass. But it isn’t just the kids. No, adults claim they see her, too, a tiny apparition in white drifting from room to room, lost and alone, calling for her mommy.
In middle school, it’s a rite of passage, being dared to spend the night inside the haunted house. I did it myself when I was twelve. Sort of. We made it a couple hours, at best. Half the battle was getting out of your own house without your mom or pop taking notice, though my pop was so ripped he didn’t know whether I was here or there or anywhere. But the other guys had to lie to their folks, saying they were sleeping somewhere else, or climb out their bedroom windows long after they were supposed to be asleep.
But it was an initiation of sorts, being recruited from the nerd herd to the in-crowd, all by spending the night with a spook.
And so we did. Or tried to at least. A bunch of buddies and I packed bags full of flashlights, lockback knives, binoculars and food, and double dog dared one another to spend the night there, in that yellow house with a ghost. Why? Don’t ask me why. We just did.
We had a disposable camera with us, too, to take pictures to show off the next day at school. Proof that we did it. We spent the night with a spook and we survived. Some guy tagged along with night-vision, another with a camcorder. Another with something he claimed was a thermal imager (it wasn’t). We climbed in through a busted window—me scratching my shin on a shard of glass—and set up camp in what was one day the living room of a happy family, with sleeping bags, pillows and all. We snapped photos, the guys and I—beside the cobwebbed fireplace, sitting on an old sunken-in sofa that seethed with bugs, crossing the threshold to her room. Her room.
Genevieve’s room.
From the stories I’ve heard over the years, Genevieve was a naughty little girl. In the five years before her death, she was caught more than once upsetting bird nests, and pulling the legs one by one off the thorax of ensnared bugs. It’s the kind of thing people remember about Genevieve, little Genevieve climbing a tree to jettison robin fledglings to the ground, whereby she scampered down the tree and stepped on them, while mama robin watched on, defenseless, unable to do a thing to save her babies. The kids in the neighborhood at the time, adults now, long gone—though their parents remain—recall the way their children didn’t want to play with Genevieve. Genevieve was cruel. Genevieve was mean. She pulled their kids’ hair; she called them names. She made them cry and fake stomachaches, saying they didn’t want to go to school, because once there Genevieve would punch them in the gut and kick their shins. She had a temper, a nasty temper, or so I’ve heard, and not just the typical pouting, crying, whining behavior of a usual five-year-old child, but a five-year-old who could’ve used a straitjacket or, at the very least, some mood stabilizing drugs.
No wonder half the town is certain she came back as a ghost, to haunt them even in death.