Quinn
At work I find that I can concentrate on nothing but Esther. Little does she know it, but she occupies every spare moment of my time. My phone rings and the first thought on my mind is Esther. Is it Esther? But it’s not Esther. I hear my name called over the PA system, beckoning me to reception, where I run quickly down the gleaming hardwood floors of the law firm, certain it’s Esther, that she’s there at the receptionist’s desk, waiting for me, but instead I see a bombastic attorney sending me to deliver documents to the office of some expert witness to be analyzed. I scurry quickly off on my task, my mind still consumed with Esther, feeling hurt and worried all at the same time. It comes to me in random moments, this fact that Esther is trying to get rid of me, a betrayal that is sometimes overshadowed for this unmistakable feeling that something is wrong, that something has happened to her.
The minute I return to the law firm from my errand, I seek out Ben and come to learn that he’s at a stalemate in his search, as well. Though he’s made attempts to track down a Mr. or Mrs. Vaughan, his search turned up empty. Ben is seated at his own office cube when I come in from behind, startling him in his swivel chair. He rubs at his head and sighs, losing hope like me. On the computer screen before him are three tormenting words: no records found.
“No word from Esther?” he asks.
I shake my head and say, “No word.”
I am not the only one who finds it impossible to focus on the tedium and stupidity of work. I couldn’t care less right now about things such as Bates labels and document productions and what kind of deadline some deranged attorney needs me to photocopy thousands of documents by. It all seems so frivolous and petty when Esther is missing.
I’m not the only one feeling frustrated by this strange turn of events. Ben feels it, too, and there in his cheerless cube we lament on how impossible it is to focus on work when work is the farthest thing from our minds. We make a pact to leave and by two-fifteen we both phony up an illness at work: food poisoning. We grope our midsections and claim to have eaten something rotten, putrid, rank. The roast beef, I say, and Ben blames his chopped chicken salad. We threaten to vomit, and it’s immediate, almost, the way we’re told to go home. Just go.
And so we do.
We share a cab, my treat because Ben is trekking out to my apartment in Andersonville to help me sort this mystery out. He offers to split the fare with me—of course he does, my very own knight in shining armor (he just doesn’t know it yet)—but I say no. The cabbie hurls us through the streets of Chicago, tossing us this way and that on the torn leather seat. He leaves the Loop and hops on Lake Shore Drive, exiting at Foster. I watch Lake Michigan out the filthy car window as we pass, the water blue, as is the sky, but that doesn’t mean either of them are the slightest bit warm. It’s a clear day, the kind of day where they say you can see all the way to Michigan from the top of the Willis Tower. I don’t know what you can see, just the other side of the lake pouring onto the shores of some negligible town, I suppose. Outside it’s cold, the wind pitiless, and though I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with our tempestuous weather, the nickname Windy City feels entirely apropos.
The cabbie reaches a good sixty miles per hour on Lake Shore Drive and though we’re both scared as all get-out, in the backseat Ben and I laugh. It feels wrong to laugh. Almost. Esther could be in real danger. But there’s also a bit of desperation in it, a bit of agony and misery. It isn’t a lighthearted laugh.
I’m concerned about Esther, of course, and yet there’s a part of me still put off by Esther’s whole lavish plot to replace me. So many of the clues point to Esther: Esther wrote the creepy notes to My Dearest; Esther placed the ad in the Reader; Esther changed her own name; Esther had a passport photo taken; Esther requested the locks be changed on our apartment door. Esther, Esther, Esther.
So why should I be worried for Esther when this is all her doing?
Also, if I don’t laugh, I might just go berserk.
As we emerge from the cab on my little residential block of Farragut Avenue, the wind whips through my hair, dragging it some way other than the way which my feet need to go. It’s with instinct that I grab for Ben’s arm and he steadies me before I release my hold and let go.
“You okay?” he asks, and I say, “Yeah. I’m okay. It’s windy.” But still, I feel his arm upon my skin. What is it that he sees in Priya, after all? Why not me instead of her?
But I can’t think about that right now.
Ben goes first, and I follow closely behind, up the concrete steps, through the white front doors and into the vacuous entryway. There’s nothing there but sixteen mailboxes and a dirty, gray doormat, smothered in grime and debris.
Welcome, says the doormat, though it’s placed upside down so you see it as you leave.
I have no idea what Ben and I plan to do, or how it is that we’ll attempt to find Esther. But I do know that I’m happy as pie to have someone here by my side, someone practical like Ben who can help me sort through all these inane ideas running amuck in my mind. It’s also lonely and I’m desperate for someone, anyone, to keep me company, for the sound of voices other than those which live inside my head. But more than anything, I’m happy it’s Ben.
I gather my mail from one of the mailboxes, and up the stairwell we go, Ben in the lead, me in the rear. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t stare at his tail end.
At the door I fumble with my keys, having almost forgotten that my key—the little copper thingie I’ve had for nearly a year—no longer fits inside the door, and I fish around in my pockets for the new one, the one I snatched from John the maintenance man’s aging hands. Once inside the apartment, I kick the door closed and drop the stash of mail on the countertop and walk away, thinking nothing of it until Ben holds up a catalog for me to see.
“I have to know,” he asks, “which one of you shops here. You or Esther?” And there’s a smile on his face, a teasing smile, but suddenly I feel irritated and confused. I’ve seen that catalog before. It’s a regular in Esther’s and my mailbox, the kind of thing that hits the recycle bin the moment it arrives, like the takeout menu from the deli where Esther and I both got sick. Why do we keep getting this catalog? On the front is a woman, no more than twenty years old, with some sort of occult ensemble on, a tunic dress that could be cute if it wasn’t decked out in skulls and crossbones, platform heels with spikes extruding from all sides. There’s a choker on her neck, black leather, pulled so taut it’s a wonder she doesn’t gag.
I reach out for the catalog in Ben’s hand and for whatever reason flip to the reverse side to see why this catalog keeps winding up in our mailbox. Does this catalog belong to Esther? Was she a vamp in a former life? A goth? Did she dress in all black and go around clubbing under the pseudonym of Raven or Tempest or Drusilla? Did she have an odd fascination with death, a fetish for the supernatural? I don’t know. I have this pesky feeling that I don’t know who Esther is anymore.
But instead of seeing Esther’s name there on the address label as I expect to see, it reads, Kelsey Bellamy or current resident of 1621 W. Farragut Avenue.
That’s my apartment building, but who is Kelsey Bellamy?
I never asked Esther about her old roommate and she never said anything. It was as if she didn’t exist, though I knew she did, of course. It was the reason for the vacant space, for Esther’s need to fill a room once complete with life but suddenly void of it.